poetry & more
Published by Finishing Line Press
December 2018
44 pages | ISBN-978-1635348088
All the Hollow Places
In this collection of poems, Molly Beth Griffin approaches simple, everyday experiences with a sense of awe that gives them weight. That determination to find hope and beauty is then unleashed upon the larger issues of our time. In this way, she tackles both intimate and societal struggles in this collection, returning always to an honoring of the connections between people, creatures, and the natural world. Poems about parenting nestle in beside poems about politics, and both internal and external dramas, personal and public stories, are handled with the same deep reverence for life.
Molly Beth Griffin‘s poems contain a quiet wildness, an introvert’s furious remapping of the world she sees. Vivid and striking, All the Hollow Places carries the reader through rough beginnings and bittersweet endings: here are poems to a giraffe savior, a hollow tree, the mess of a monarch before the sun has dried its wings. Your heart will grow when you read these beautiful poems.
—Bao Phi, award winning author of the poetry collections Sông I Sing and Thousand Star Hotel.
In compelling ways, Molly Beth Griffin‘s new collection teaches us to see meaning and value in the small objects and moments. She shows us that in taking care of these small things we counteract the weight and sorrow we acknowledge in the big world. All the Hollow Places has poems that respond to poems from her previous collection, Under Our Feet, yet it stands alone—in these new poems the poet sees the world clearly: its bounty, its struggles, and its beauty.
—Deborah Keenan, author of ten collections of poetry, most recently, so she had the world, and a book of writing ideas, from tiger to prayer.
Published by Finishing Line Press
December 2018
44 pages | ISBN-978-1635348088
All the Hollow Places
In this collection of poems, Molly Beth Griffin approaches simple, everyday experiences with a sense of awe that gives them weight. That determination to find hope and beauty is then unleashed upon the larger issues of our time. In this way, she tackles both intimate and societal struggles in this collection, returning always to an honoring of the connections between people, creatures, and the natural world. Poems about parenting nestle in beside poems about politics, and both internal and external dramas, personal and public stories, are handled with the same deep reverence for life.
Molly Beth Griffin‘s poems contain a quiet wildness, an introvert’s furious remapping of the world she sees. Vivid and striking, All the Hollow Places carries the reader through rough beginnings and bittersweet endings: here are poems to a giraffe savior, a hollow tree, the mess of a monarch before the sun has dried its wings. Your heart will grow when you read these beautiful poems.
—Bao Phi, award winning author of the poetry collections Sông I Sing and Thousand Star Hotel.
In compelling ways, Molly Beth Griffin‘s new collection teaches us to see meaning and value in the small objects and moments. She shows us that in taking care of these small things we counteract the weight and sorrow we acknowledge in the big world. All the Hollow Places has poems that respond to poems from her previous collection, Under Our Feet, yet it stands alone—in these new poems the poet sees the world clearly: its bounty, its struggles, and its beauty.
—Deborah Keenan, author of ten collections of poetry, most recently, so she had the world, and a book of writing ideas, from tiger to prayer.
Published by Finishing Line Press
March 2018
36 pages | ISBN-978-1635344295
Under Our Feet
Amid the everyday dramas of a walk to the bus stop, a drive to the grocery store, a trip to the zoo, how do we slow down and pay attention to the small miracles around us? We think of mindfulness as something we get to do when we escape from our kids-sitting alone in an immaculate yoga studio or on a quiet retreat in some pristine location. But children don’t have to be a barrier to contemplation. They can inspire a special kind of awe in the natural world and in the mundane details of life-but only if we stop and notice. Yes, during bath time, and while we weed the garden, our kids-especially, sometimes, our most challenging kids-can show us deep truths. And when the larger world seems to be falling apart, we must realize that our daily struggles aren’t separate from those events. How are we connected-to the world, to each other, and to those parts of ourselves that we’ve put on hold or hidden away? How can we walk alongside our children, at their pace, and let them teach us to see the world in new ways?
Molly Beth Griffin’s new chapbook, Under Our Feet, gives us poetry that honors the smallest things of the universe, values the joys and struggles that come when choosing to raise children, poetry that asks us to consider the blessings of the natural world, and what we will do with those blessings, and, poetry that insists that private joys and struggles must always be kept in perspective as the world of racism and wars continues. Most compelling, I think, is Griffin’s clear-eyed understanding that everything is connected. As she writes about the killing of Philando Castile, or the Orlando massacre, she offers us her judgments, in powerful lines of poetry, and places herself as witness. She also, in this carefully focused chapbook, chooses, notices, acts, and thinks deeply and unsparingly about the poet’s right and obligation to judge, to speak, to live with and love human beings and the material world.
—Deborah Keenan, author of ten collections of poetry, most recently, so she had the world, and a book of writing ideas, from tiger to prayer.
Published by Finishing Line Press
March 2018
36 pages | ISBN-978-1635344295
Under Our Feet
Amid the everyday dramas of a walk to the bus stop, a drive to the grocery store, a trip to the zoo, how do we slow down and pay attention to the small miracles around us? We think of mindfulness as something we get to do when we escape from our kids-sitting alone in an immaculate yoga studio or on a quiet retreat in some pristine location. But children don’t have to be a barrier to contemplation. They can inspire a special kind of awe in the natural world and in the mundane details of life-but only if we stop and notice. Yes, during bath time, and while we weed the garden, our kids-especially, sometimes, our most challenging kids-can show us deep truths. And when the larger world seems to be falling apart, we must realize that our daily struggles aren’t separate from those events. How are we connected-to the world, to each other, and to those parts of ourselves that we’ve put on hold or hidden away? How can we walk alongside our children, at their pace, and let them teach us to see the world in new ways?
Molly Beth Griffin’s new chapbook, Under Our Feet, gives us poetry that honors the smallest things of the universe, values the joys and struggles that come when choosing to raise children, poetry that asks us to consider the blessings of the natural world, and what we will do with those blessings, and, poetry that insists that private joys and struggles must always be kept in perspective as the world of racism and wars continues. Most compelling, I think, is Griffin’s clear-eyed understanding that everything is connected. As she writes about the killing of Philando Castile, or the Orlando massacre, she offers us her judgments, in powerful lines of poetry, and places herself as witness. She also, in this carefully focused chapbook, chooses, notices, acts, and thinks deeply and unsparingly about the poet’s right and obligation to judge, to speak, to live with and love human beings and the material world.
—Deborah Keenan, author of ten collections of poetry, most recently, so she had the world, and a book of writing ideas, from tiger to prayer.
journals & anthologies
Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose, and Pride
Editor Andrea Jenkins, Editor John Medeiros, Editor Lisa Marie Brimmer
Forty-four LGBTQIA+ voices provide a vibrant, necessary, and dazzling component of Minnesota’s cultural and historical fabric. Available from Minnesota Historical Society Press.
Molly’s contribution is a personal essay called “The Exact One I Wanted.”
Stone Gathering Journal
