Kris Whorton | Writer, Teacher, Editor

ISBN: 978-1-962405-67-6

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Through Jan 31^st.

Kris Whorton’s Everyday Omens traces a life’s journey through intimate moments of family, childhood, and personal transformation. The poems move between places––from suburban America to European cities, along Alaskan shores to Southern forests––revealing a speaker navigating complex relationships with parents, brothers, and lovers. Childhood trauma casts shadows while nature offers solace. Birds, water, and changing seasons become metaphors for the passage of time and emotional landscapes. Through precise imagery and unflinching honesty, these poems explore resilience, the search for belonging, and the courage to forge one’s own path despite––or because of––what has been inherited and endured.

Kris Whorton’s Everyday Omens is imbued with fresh insight as she explores memories of childhood to adulthood and back again in artful lines. This collection is a poignant reminder of both the joys and insecurities of growing up, as it seeks to understand how we are to navigate the past. Whorton is a gifted poet who sees clearly the many miracles that are too often overlooked, and she reminds readers in “A Strange Relief” to “fill your pockets / with apple blossoms. Make your own golden rules.” These poems are a balm for the soul, and they are worth reaching for again and again.

~ KB Ballentine, author of All the Way Through and Spirit of Wild

Set in the everyday, Kris Whorton’s Everyday Omens explores the struggle against familial and societal expectations, as well as those of her own creation. Most at home in the natural world, she finds her greatest healing in communion with the outdoors, whether hiking with her dogs, tending to a baby chick, sitting beside a stream, or walking in the woods. Redemption comes through a recognition of interconnectivity with the other-than-human: “On this January day, crisp and chill, / a snowflake’s edge, no birds /cut the dove-colored sky, no lonely cow / lows. Only Guinness, my dog, / pants softly at my side, our breath, / made crystalline, tinkles / just beyond my hearing” (“Winter Walk”).

~ Pamela Uschuk, author of Refugee

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Kris Whorton's Alchemy invites us into the world of stillness and movement, the personal and the physical, as she explores the body, family, and nature and the complex relationship between the elements. The body is scarred and needy, nature is a place of wonder and transformation and the speakers in these poems immerse themselves in wilderness and wildness again and again. There they discover the mystery that is this very physical world. Each poem is a part of the journey, ever questioning, ever evolving, from family and lovers, from the loss of self to something more beautifully complete.

In Alchemy, Kris Whorton starts her poems in the dead center of the body, in the beating heart, and pulses outward to show how her speakers face the world, life, family, friends, all our struggles. These are carefully wrought poems in form but wild in nature and "in" nature.

~ Jessica Barksdale, author of Grim Honey

Whether finding a skeleton in the woods, observing black bears or dolphins, or even meditating on her own eventual death, Whorton brings us on a masterful, heartfelt journey where to not “always recognize what we’re seeing” is to enhance the mysterious “alchemy” of our lives.

~ Richard Jackson, author of The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems

In Kris Whorton’s poetry the body and landscape are interchangeable—wildness and wilderness abound...We are nature, and subject to it, and to its desires.

~ Danielle Hanson, author of Fraying Edge of Sky