Our lives are awash with moments when we come undone.
We face a loved one's belongings after they have gone, a deer jumps in front of the car, or we experience a debilitating illness.Â
The Chapel of Small Breath meets us there.
As the collection moves from love to loss to possible renewal, the reader experiences the journey through precise and stunning images.Â
Linn invites us into the liminal space of loss and shows us the holy that's stitched right through it.
This book has been on my heart for decades.Â
My friend Lynn Rather, published a book as she was dying.Â
After Lynn died, I decided I wasn't going to wait that long.Â
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Buy NowThis is a book of loss and wayfinding through grief, and about possible renewal.Â
Itâs about renewal thatâs far from Instagram-perfect.Â
A renewal that takes more time than weâd prefer.Â
A renewal we plant seeds for even as weâre drowning in darkness.
I hope that the reader sees themselves, a great swirl of partsâÂ
tumbled through the seasons of a lifetime...Â
And cradled by the earth, our complexity, and whatâs holyâthrough all of it.Â
âThe Chapel of Small Breath is a work of art. It is brave and wise. Rhonda Linn traces a young womanâs experience through a marriage that dissolves, complex layers of pain and uncertainty that result, and the journey toward possible renewal. The poems are deeply rewarding.
Father Richard Rohr says that the spiritual life is about facing pain. If we donât learn how to transform our pain, we will likely transmit it to others. In The Chapel of Small Breath, Linn shows us the journey of transforming pain: doing this, we realize we live within a small dwelling of holiness.â Â
âDr. William Palmer, poet
âRhonda Linnâs poems thrum with so much being itâs like bathing in the light of eternity. In one poem in The Chapel of Small Breath she writes, âNow I believe in undoingââand what all her poems marvelously undo is take down the false facades of this world and offering us something radiant and terrifying and utterly true. Sheâs the spiritual daughter of poets like Edith SĂśdergranâand hers is the perfect voice of our uncertain age. To read her work is a form of salvation.âÂ
âDr. Robert Vivian, author of The Tall Grass Trilogy, Mystery My Country, and Cold Snap As Yearning
âConfronting the ambiguous loss of a loved one to mental illness, Rhonda Linnâs debut leaves no emotional stone unturned.
Through taut images and verdant metaphors, she buildsâbrick by brick, plank by plankâa sacred space with room for both tenderness and grief. In these poems, Linn paces the abandoned pews to ask, what is gained?
The Chapel of Small Breath âjut[s] vulnerable into the pale sky,â and it has a seat for every reader.â Â
âJoshua Zeitler
âIn The Chapel of Small Breath, Rhonda Linn writes of a life âalways pulled across the wire / in the half-gasp of longing,â of mind and body traversing the liminality that may be our truest state.
âThose strike-slip boundaries are the danger,â Linn tells us as the collection arcs from love to loneliness to dissolution to a renewal thatâs no easy answer but offers, in its a vulnerability, a new rush of risks. âOh Holy Web / holding me / between God / and the sidewalk / Open me up, / just open me up,â Linn incants, and the world obliges, and the reader is better for the stunning poems that follow.âÂ
âKerri Webster, author of The Trailhead, Grand & Arsenal, and We Do Not Eat Our Hearts AloneÂ
Rhonda Linn is a writer, educator, and entrepreneur who has spent the last 11 years living with the land and leaning into natureâs wisdom by planting a permaculture-based food forest on 36 acres of land in Michigan. Her marketing agency offers copywriting, online business management, and publication support for world-changing spiritual, nature-based, and holistic wellness businesses.Â
Linn writes and works to remember that we are cradled by nature through the soaring beauty (and muck) of our daily lives. She writes to remember our sovereignty from a system that profits from our illness, overwork, and disconnection. And she writes as a reminder that our hearts are shiningâresonate and infinite. We only have to remember that. She believes that a different world is possible and itâs our job to build it. That work starts in our own hearts and mindsâand in our homes.Â
You can find her ever-evolving writing on Earthen Jar; Stars on Substack.