The Beautiful Keeps Breathing

Beauty breathes through each poem in Claire Coenen's wondrous, open-hearted debut collection. She sees the world with "singing eyes," and makes of each closely observed moment a sacred space that we can step into beside her. This book "will keep you, attend to your wounds, and teach you to root," as she says in one of her luminous poems. To read The Beautiful Keeps Breathing is to experience the joy of a poet coming into the fullness of her own voice, "fierce and free" at last.

-James Crews, author of Kindness Will Save the World

As I read Claire Coenen's poetry, I am right there with her on the porch snapping green beans, with her in her childhood living room leaping from the coffee table to the "cloud cushions." As the wise woman says, in one of my favorite poems in The Beautiful Keeps Breathing, her "words are everything." Open this book to any page and be pulled in, transported, and lifted by the everything of Claire's words.

-Julia Fehrenbacher, author of Staying in Love