Hilde Weisert

Happy October, everyone.  Here in the Northeast, it really feels like fall, with chilly mornings and evenings coming all too quickly.  It’s time to curl up by the fire with a good book and nice cup of tea – or to open your computer and scroll through pages like this one.

We have an interesting poet to introduce to you today – one who is not afraid to tackle the difficult subjects, as you will see when you read her poems.

C0-winner of the 2017 Gretchen Warren Award from the New England Poetry Club and winner of the 2016 Tifferet Journal Poetry Award, Hilde Weisert has held fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.  When she lived in New Jersey, she was a Geraldine R. Dodge Poet and edited Teaching for Delight: Ways of Doing Poetry in Schools, published by the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Project.  She now lives in Sandisfield, Massachusetts and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

The Scheme of Things, her full-length poetry collection, was published in 2015 by David Robert Books, with a mysteriously beautiful abstract cover by Jim Haba, whom many of you know as the beloved former director of the Dodge Poetry Festival.  With Dr. Elizabeth Stone, she co-edited an anthology, Animal Doctors, Animal People: Poems, essays and stories on our essential connection, published by the Ontario Veterinary College, University of Guelph, 2012.

It’s a pleasure to share with you the three poems below by Hilde Weisert.  “To Ilona, My Stepmother” and “Questions for Our Mothers” appeared in the 2017 anthology Writing Fire: An Anthology Celebrating the Power of Women’s Words, published by Green Fire Press.  “The Certainty of  Others” is from The Scheme of Things.”