Here is homage finely wrought-for the home place, its seasons and people, for nature's inventory of the living and dead-all of it tendered with virtuosity and imaginative grace. -Thomas Lynch, author of Still Life in Milford, The Undertaking -Life Studies from the Dismal Trade and Bodies in Motion and at Rest Do not dismiss this poet in her own country...Michigan, an emotional geography deeply experienced, prized and evoked. Houghteling's poems in her new book, The Blue House, work Zen-like on me with intense, unpredictable simplicity. Like one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, Marla Kay Houghteling climbs inside nature's heart, exciting in mine dormant memories and oft-lost priorities. I understand at once her woman's voice, compassionate, wise, witness to her own life and the lives that move her. I especially urge this universally appealing collection on Michigan readers and libraries. -Mary Blocksma, author of Lake Lover's Year, Great Lakes Nature and What's on the Beach The Blue House is an important collection of poems which trace the changing land- scape of Lake Michigan's northern shores and the inner life of the people living there. People and landscape are so well interwoven that at times it seems they are body and soul claiming the last bits of beauty and humanity. In our age of concrete, plastic and steel the celebration of native trees, flowers, and butterflies claiming a place outside of time is remarkably powerful and significant. Poem after poem says in moving, lucid and yes, local language, that there are still people naming trees, naming feelings, naming loss, naming aging by their proper, unforgettable names. If you want to know what it is like to live Up North in Michigan, take The Blue House as a guide. -Carmen Bugan, author of Crossing the Carpathians These lovely poems by Marla Kay Houghteling encapsulate vivid moments in a woman's life. Her poems sing of love and loss, joy and grief, and of color. -Ann Bardens-McClellan, author of Stone and Water There is quiet beauty in these poems. Houghteling takes us "through the sweetness of milkweed" and into a pungent landscape of the heart. She offers us tough houses of memory in a northern Michigan "icebox winter," but "in summer monarchs pile up." This is a poet who "can find snow in July." We are blessed and transformed. -Margo LaGattuta, poet, essayist, author of Embracing the Fall
About the Author: Marla Kay Houghteling started life in Walkerville, Michigan. Except for a family move to Florida for two years, she grew up in Michigan. After college and two years teaching with the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, West Africa, she moved to Pennsylvania. Her work included teaching and then a move to publishing. She began free-lance writing while holding various editorial jobs. In 1996, after completing at MFA in Writing, she moved back to Michigan and now resides north of Harbor Springs. She and her husband live on 23 acres of conservancy easement. She conducts wrtiting workshops in schools and at their property, Second Growth. A recipient of grants and fellowships for teaching and writing, she completed a novel under an MCACA grant based on her great-uncle's account of his 1898 journey to the Klondike. She has published two collections of poetry--The Blue House and Assisted Living.