Emblems of Earth and Light Paperback – February 25, 2026

In this intimate collection of poems, R. J. Hejna writes with an interiorized contemplation that never fails to express emotional release with expositional grace. The poems here are generously imagistic, sly, and intelligent, and bright with meditative allure. Throughout, Hejna is thoughtfully and almost yearningly preoccupied with the way identity — as a confinement experience — must be liberated through ecstatic movement, emotionalized buoyancy, and spiritual exultation.Many of the poems offered here articulate movement as the means whereby the self expands. In “Loons Opening a Blind Man’s Eyes,” Hejna concludes with the metaphor, “Perhaps he is learning how to walk in the middle of the air.’’Other poems insist that wounding experience is prerequisite to wisdom’s gleaning opportunity. “Everyone’s a cutting, are they not? And all bent on the impossible.” Or these instructive lines from the poem, “Into the Slow River:” “More than survive, we must meld together, blend brooks, streams of self, our residue sifted, our silt and peat of heritage tumbled through forest, rock, tilled fields, and on toward transformation.”What Hejna is arguing for in these exquisite poems, is what incisive language can offer to us. Namely, that we can and we must be transformed through our engagement with intimate reverie. Hejna articulates this aim in these gorgeous lines: “I have reversed life into itself with an arrangement of my hands, and reflect a dreamer’s way of moving.”Hejna’s wisdom remains solitary and humble, as in this one poignant line that could speak for all of us, about a bird “whose song was a refuge in a lonesome house, like one star in fog upon which to wish.” These stellar poems invite life’s warmth, its ecstatic buoyancy, deeply in. Read them and be blessed by emblems of earth and light.—Ken Meisel, author, The Light Most Glad of All and Chasing Names on Nameless Water Read more