After a devastating diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer, biologist and
poet Eva Saulitis found herself gripped by a long-buried childhood urge
to pray. Finding little solace in the rote "from the fox-hole please
Gods" arising unbidden in her head, she set herself the task of
examining the impulse itself, waking every morning in darkness to write
poems, driven on by the questions: What is prayer? What am I praying to?
What am I praying for? Who is listening? Each day's poem proposed a new
and surprising answer as, over two years, she traced the questions back
to her origins, her Latvian roots, her peasant grandmother, her
war-haunted father, her secret-bearing mother, her childhood
Catholicism, her obsession with the natural world. Moving from inward to
outward, among radically different geographies (coastal Alaska, Latvia,
and Hawaii) and spiritual influences (Catholicism, mysticism, Zen
Buddhism) as well as forms, these biologically precise poems range
widely in their search. Unexpectedly, these prayer-poems, forged out of
a solitary confrontation with death, take a reader not out of, but
deeper into physicality--of the body, the earth, and language itself. As
Saulitis learns, what is most desired is not transcendence, but for as
long as possible, "her hands thrust deep in the world."
