Almost Everything, Almost Nothing

Almost Everything, Almost Nothing is a balm for busy and troubling times, immersing the reader in lyric landscape and birdsong, a tapestry as well as a kind of territory. Ballentine's subtle, personal narrative is a light revealed late in these poems, prompting the reader to reconsider the poem, so recently traversed, with acute reflection.   "Our connections with the past, with each other and our surroundings, and with current events sculpt our attitudes and actions."            ~ KB Ballentine The impression of this decades current events, our zeitgeist,  lies here as well, buried as bones, or blooming in hues of ash and bruise. The   ubiquitous  sorrow of humanity suffering at its own hands, in these poems, rises occasionally like the seep of deep aches from old wounds. brought on by inclement weather, striking through the surface to connect the poets narrative with our own. These moments of connection come and go, as if Ballentine's pencil  were a needle piercing and stitching a field of material, a material patterned with the more constant, yet seasonally shifting cycles of birds and flowers and weather. "Almost Everything, Almost Nothing could be a definition of life - its potential promise, its potential curse. In this intense collection, KB Ballentine presents the dark ghosts of loss and love, awakened and grieved amidst historical terror and the calming beauty of the natural world. Often loss creates a personal aloneness the landscape cannot fill. What can we do when terror strikes an ocean away - plant flower bulbs in winter before bluebirds signal spring? Ballentine leads us through a four-season journey in which we learn that as humans, we can't hide from our sorrows and live this gift of life. Ballentine's poetry helps us belong to the ghosts of our loves and silences, our leavings, losses and grief." ~ Bill Brown, author of Elemental "Through the poems of Almost Everything, Almost Nothing, we are led on walks through the natural world of rose blossom and mimosa feather, of mushroom huddle and carob shadow, and, most of all, of light. Love, desire, history, memory, terror, longing - a whole range of trancelike connections with experience - KB embraces them all with close, sustained, transforming attention and insight rooted in oneness with the universe." ~ Mary Kay Rummel, Poet Laureate of Ventura County, CA,  and author of The Lifeline Trembles