Your Face in the Fire

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky's soul was shaped by deep impressions made on her by India, where she lived for two years in the 1960s. It was there the Goddess claimed her. It was there that myths began singing to her. It was there her soul remembered other lives. It was there her stars insisted she learn to tend her fire. And the fire spoke: I am the heat of your passion. It is I who will show you your way. What to do on her return to America but become a Jungian, and a poet?

Lowinsky won the synkroniciti magazine "Space" prize, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She also won the Blue Light Poetry Prize, the Obama Millennial Award and is an International Merit Award Winner in the Atlanta Review 2020 Poetry contest. Your Face in the Fire is her sixth poetry collection.

Lowinsky is a Jungian Analyst, a member of the San Francisco Jung Institute, and poetry editor for Psychological Perspectives. She has led a poetry workshop, Deep River, for many years at the San Francisco Jung Institute and co-edited an anthology of poems by its participants, Soul Making in the Valley of the Shadow. She blogs about poetry and life at sisterfrombelow.com.

"To read this book is to drink of a rare and holy elixir: an exuberant, deeply soulful life masterfully distilled into word music. If you read slowly and are lucky, you might fall into the alchemical vat with her, where your own life begins to crackle and shimmer in her light. In previous works, Naomi gorgeously, fearlessly answered the call of the ancestors to remember, to grieve, to embody, and to reclaim the pearls of grace left in the ruins of exile and shattered dreams. Here she sings her own long and inspired life, from starry vault to watery cave, from Zion to California to Mexico, with the same unflinching gaze and eye for beauty, where the goddess is found inside every stone, where even evil and death - including her own - are alchemized to serve as chiaroscuro revealing love's transfigurations over time. Her lamentations are so inseparable from her passionate, sensual exultations that they become the song of life itself, utterly intoxicated with the heartbreaking beauty of existence on Earth in the eyes of the soul. As a result, she writes, Elijah appears at the table: "Here I am says he/ Here you are.""

- Frances Hatfield, PhD, LMFT, former poetry editor, Jung Journal: Culture and Psyche; author, Rudiments of Flight.