KB Ballentine’s latest collection, All the Way Through (Sheila-Na-Gig, Inc.), will be released soon and today, October 20, 2024, is the last day for discounted pre-orders!

About All the Way Through

In All the Way Through, KB Ballentine explores the weight and value of of human experience. It is “a meditation against forgetting those moments we tend to throw away — lonely, angry, ugly, grief-filled moments we would rather forget.” It reminds us of the importance of the entire of journey—especially the difficulties we encounter along the way that shape us.

Praise for All the Way Through

KB Ballentine has gathered another outstanding collection of poems, and if you are a new reader to her work something special awaits you in these pages. All the Way Through takes up Robert Frost’s wisdom, “the best way out is always through,” and applies it to the pain and beauty we find everywhere around us, from Arkansas to Kabul to the sandy beach. Though there is much grief to confront, these poems sing their way out of despair and through into hope. In “The Lost Heart,” one of the most splendid lyrics in the book, the speaker is lifted by birdsong into a state of profound understanding: “Each tree branch frosted, / the choir of evening descends / into silence…. / Maybe our loss is the miracle.” Ballentine offers nature as our bounty, summer as our season of salt, and love as the redemption for the many losses we all must endure. The words of these poems serve as balm and comfort, and they are fine companions for the road ahead. —Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine

 All the Way Through (Sheila-Na-Gig, Inc.)is available for pre-order now through October 20, 2024. Learn more about Sheila-Na-Gig, Inc.

About the Author

KB Ballentine received her MFA in Poetry from Lesley University, Cambridge, MA. She currently teaches high school composition, creative writing, and theatre and adjuncts for a local college. She is a board member for SoLit (Chattanooga, TN) and a member of the Poetry Society of Tennessee, the Chattanooga Writers’ Guild, the Knoxville Writers’ Guild, and Rhyme-n-Chatt. Ballentine hosts a local Open Mic each month, conducts writing workshops, and is currently a reader for Compass Rose (Washington DC).

Ballentine is the author of eight collections of poetry, including the 2023 Blue Light Press publication Spirit of Wild and the 2016 Blue Light Press Book Award winner The Perfume of Leaving. Earlier books can be found with Iris Press, Blue Light Press, Middle Creek Publishing, and Celtic Cat Publishing. Published in North Dakota Quarterly, Atlanta Review and Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, among others, her work also appears in anthologies including Women Speak: Volume 8 (2022), Appalachia Unmasked (2022), The Strategic Poet: Honing the Craft (2021), I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing (2021), Women Speak: Volume 7 (2021), Pandemic Evolution (2021), Pandemic Puzzles(2021), In Plein Air (2017) and Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (2017). Learn more at www.kbballentine.com.