Meadowlark Press releases
Luminescence in Season by Colleen Alles
Book Description:
The poems in Luminescence in Season pause to consider the wonders of everyday interactions: a summer wedding, a neighbor’s wandering dog, a trip to the public museum to see the carousel in motion. Anchored by the triptych poem, “Travelogue” and rendered in three parts, these poems take the reader from the depths of black moss to the shallow water at the surface where life’s true ecstasies can be found.
What
Readers Are Saying:
In her new collection of poems, Luminescence in
Season, poet Colleen Alles holds up a glowing lantern, illuminating page by
page. In her beautiful poems, which seem like prayers, she guides us to and
past the wellsprings of those we love, some sitting around our dinner tables
each night, some transitioning, some already gone, though only outwardly
so.
—Kathleen Driskell, author of Goat-Footed
Gods and Kentucky Poet Laureate
2025-26
In these tender, quiet poems, Colleen Alles captures daily moments that might
otherwise escape our notice—cleaning her son’s fingerprints from a mirror,
making a cup of tea, skipping stones, comforting a beloved dog during a storm,
riding a carousel with her daughter. Being with these poems is a joy. Through
the poet’s careful attention, seemingly ordinary moments transform into
meditations, odes, and prayers. I want to linger in this book, where, as Alles
writes of baking a cake in a small house, “the sweetness touches every room.”
—Kathleen McGookey, author of Paper
Sky
