All my books are available from the publishers as well as from all online booksellers.
Once Upon a Tar Creek: Mining for Voices
Once Upon a Tar Creek: Mining for Voices, is part eco-poetry collection, part memoir, part Quapaw history. In this fascinating, well-researched book, Hurtt explores the story and voices associated with one of the most polluted waterways in the United States, Tar Creek, located in Oklahoma. It is a cautionary tale that reminds us that on this planet, we all live downstream. a Tar Creek: Mining for Voices is close to completion.
Tar Creek has been called the “worst environmental disaster no one has heard of” and Maryann is heart-deep in its story.
“Joining a long tradition of ecopoetry, Once Upon a Tar Creek distinguishes itself as a poetry of conscience. Layered with voices of history, mystery, and good sense, these haunting poems prove the author’s claim: “truth is in the searching.” Raw truths abound here in image and story as Hurtt reminds us we, too, are “downstream people,” heirs to many kinds of pollutants. The chat piles of racism, no less than mining, are ours to clean up.” —Kimberly Blaeser, author of Copper Yearning, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2015-16
“Loving a place is hard work, a labor that can be joyous and grievous. Here are stories rich in the history and humanity of Tar Creek, which Hurtt rightfully celebrates and mourns. As a water boy prophetically exclaims in a poem: “someday/you might just wish/you’d shown some respect.” —Todd Davis, author of Native Species and Winterkill
“Once Upon a Tar Creek is a communal story, a tribute to the neglected history of many voices, even as it is a cautionary tale. The author’s commitment to this place is heroic; her passionate writing, graced with integrity, compels us all to care. This is a marvelous book. This is an important book.” —Ken Hada, author of Sunlight and Cedar
Buy from Publisher | Buy from the author
River
Chapbook published by Aldrich Press, 2016
“The words in River flow into your mind with the true complexity of water: words and stories twist and swirl, turn inside out, and tug your thoughts into alignment with the strange and wonderful. This is a world where ashes shout, where life and death are the petals and thorns in a single garden, and visions blind you into seeing.”
— Kim Stafford, author of The Muses Among Us and Other Pleasures of the Writers Craft
“Bless Maryann Hurtt for chronicling the way we leave this world with humor and compassion, so that “even death / is grace.” In this moving collection of poems, former hospice nurse Hurtt combines a clear-eyed attention to life’s end with details from the natural world— “tiny end-of-season roses hold teaspoons of snow”—allowing us to view death not with fear but with reverence. These fine, elegiac poems suggest death is as natural as the seasons, showing us how ‘in the end/ we become / what we love.'” — Holly J. Hughes, author of Sailing by Ravens, The Pen & the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World, and editor of Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease
“So wise, so gentle. So beautiful and glad. If you are astonished at life or confused by death, you will love the River poems. I will give River to my closest friends—a shining gift.” — Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Riverwalking and Wild Comfort
Buy from Publisher | Buy from the author
The Aging Poems
The newest collaboration from The Grand Avenue Poetry Collective, from Water’s Edge Press (2018)
This collection of 34 poems by seven Sheboygan, WI area poets, including Maryann Hurtt, is a funny, sad, and beautiful look at the process of aging.
Buy from Publisher | Buy from the author
The Water Poems
Full length book published by Water’s Edge Press, 2017
The Water Poems, a collection of poems from The Grand Avenue Poetry Collective, six poets from the Sheboygan, WI area: Sylvia Cavanaugh, Nancy Harrison Durdin, Dawn Hogue, Maryann Hurtt, Georgia Ressmeyer, and Marilyn Zelke Windau.
The 72 poems in this collection will connect readers to water in many forms, including rivers, lakes, and oceans. The rich, imagistic poetry in this volume explores the realm of family, love, and loss, as well as the notion of water as it relates to transcendent human experience.
Buy from Publisher | Buy from the author