Welcome to the May 2019 Blue Heron Speaks Feature! It is an honor and a delight to shine a spotlight on the work of poet, KB Ballentine, author of Almost Everything, Almost Nothing (Middle Creek Publishing, 2017), The Perfume of Leaving (Blue Light Press, 2016), What Comes of Waiting (Blue Light Press, 2013), and other titles. Ballentine’s sixth collection of poetry, The Light Tears Loose, will be released early autumn 2019 by Blue Light Press. There is music and dance in Ballentine’s words. There is color, vibrancy, and life in every line and every verse. The reader must pause, reflect, and re-visit each poem, in order to gather up every last petal of inspiration from the garden of ideas, which she so graciously gifts to us. This is especially apparent in these last lines (from the poem, “Recipe for Making the Color Gold”): “Sprinkle an echo of stars across the night, / and the light of a song will rise with the dawn.”

Please visit the Blue Heron Speaks Featured Author page of our site, to read 3 sample poems by KB Ballentine, and to learn more about her beautiful work!

(author photo credit: Jim Canestrari)

KB Ballentine’s sixth collection of poetry, The Light Tears Loose, will be released early autumn 2019 by Blue Light Press.  Almost Everything, Almost Nothing was released in 2017 by Middle Creek Publishing. The 2016 Blue Light Press Book Award winner, KB’s fourth collection The Perfume of Leaving was preceded by What Comes of Waiting, also by Blue Light Press (2013). Published in many print and online journals such as Crab Orchard Review and Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, KB has two other collections of poetry, Fragments of Light (2009) and Gathering Stones (2008), published by Celtic Cat Publishing. Her work also appears in anthologies including In Plein Air (2017), Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (2017), In God’s Hand (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).

Ballentine received her MFA in Poetry from Lesley University, Cambridge, MA. She currently teaches high school theatre and creative writing and adjuncts for a local college.

Learn more about KB Ballentine at www.kbballentine.com.