Poetry Society of Tennessee member KB Ballentine recently launched her 8th poetry collection, Spirit of Wild, May 10, 2023, at the Soddy Daisy Community Library. 

About Spirit of Wild

Wild weaves through each of us, but the spirit of wild doesn’t always rage. Sometimes it is the gentle, quiet moments alone in our souls that show us who and what we are. The spirit of strength, the spirit of wonder, the spirit of curiosity, the spirit of fury, the spirit of peace are all part of us. But we bottle or ignore them, questioning our anxiety and depression.

These poems speak to that spark in each of us that we might remember even through our sorrows, tragedies, joys, and silent seasons that the spirit of wild doesn’t call us – it is us. Don’t ignore it. Don’t let it go. Hold it tight as you dream, when you wake, and as you live your day. Yes, live. Live and embrace wild.

Praise for Spirit of Wild

As KB Ballentine delves without fear from windowed rooms into a wilderness of forest and ocean, it soon becomes clear that even the darkness in her collection Spirit of Wild is one that teems with life, wing, and song. Ballentine shows us that there is “a shelter for the sacred in each of us.” Spirit of Wild is a balm, and I didn’t know how much I needed it.

-Chera Hammons, author of Maps of Injury

Spirit of Wild confirms that “each day waits with sudden mysteries, / offerings, / like dreams half-remembered / from the night.” In lyrical, precise language that throbs and pulses with the rhythms of the natural world, Ballentine celebrates the spirit of all manner of life’s organic wonders, from the fox and wren to the bee and seahorse, to lavender fog and “stones cloaked in mossy silence.” I can’t think of a better time for this exuberant collection to come to light, nor a better time to heed Ballentine’s call to “cast off the rooms where we’ve boxed ourselves tight / step into the den of the forest’s deep heart.”

— Hayley Mitchell Haugen, Sheila-Na-Gig Editions

Spirit of Wild and other collections are available for purchase. Explore her website, contact her or follow her on social platforms.

About the Author

KB Ballentine resides in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and teaches creative writing, theatre arts, and literature to high school and college students. She has an M.A. in Writing and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, Poetry.

Her work has appeared in numerous journals and publications, including Atlanta Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Linnet’s Wings, Crab Orchard Review, Alehouse, Tidal Basin Review, Haight–Ashbury Literary Journal, The Sigh Press, and MO: Writings from the River.

Ballentine’s seventh collection Edge of the Echo was published by Iris Press in May 2021. The Light Tears Loose appeared the summer of 2019 from Blue Light Press. 2017 showcased Ballentine’s fifth poetry collection Almost Everything, Almost Nothing, published by Middle Creek Publishing and Audio. In 2016, The Perfume of Leaving received the Blue Light Press Book Award.

Her work also appears in several anthologies: White Stag: Spirit Anthology (2023), LOVE Anthology (2023), Women Speak: Volume 8 (2022), Appalachia (Un)Masked (2022), I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing (2022), The Strategic Poet (2021), Women Speak: Vol 7 (2021), Pandemic Puzzle Poems (2021), The Mountain (2021), Pandemic Evolution (2021), In Plein Air (2017), Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (2017), In God’s Hands (2017), River of Earth and Sky: Poems for the Twenty-first Century (2015), Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VI:  Tennessee (2013) and Southern Light: Twelve Contemporary Southern Poets (2011).

She was selected as a finalist for the Southern Alliance of Literature Outstanding Writer for 2021; she was awarded the Libba Moore Gray Poetry Prize in 2016, in 2014 she was a finalist in the Ron Rash Poetry Awards, and in 2006 a finalist for the Joy Harjo Poetry Award. She was a recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize in 2006 and in 2007.