There’s No Wrong Way: 44 Meditations
Ever wanted to try meditation, but thought you weren’t capable? Ever tried and decided you failed? This book lays out 44 suggestions for different types of meditation, and helps define meditation and mindfulness in the process. It’s fun, often light-hearted, and full of hope.
From the book:
“First, what is meditation?…For the purposes of this book, meditation is an activity that brings your attention to the present moment. Some practitioners would call this mindfulness…”
“[Meditation is] as delicious as chocolate cake, as absorbing as video games, as relaxing as lying down. A little meditation gives you a burst of wellbeing. The key to meditation as fun? Resisting the shoulds.”
“Stoplight meditation: When you’re driving and you come to a red light, instead of fretting about being stopped, remember that your fretting will not affect the light at all. It will turn green when it turns green; you cannot control it. So drop your shoulders and take a deep breath, all the way in, all the way out.”
“Aquarium meditation: Go somewhere that has an aquarium and watch the fish. Watch the bubbles. It’s a whole different world in there, far from your worries about car insurance and the price of cupcakes.”
Drawing from a variety of philosophies and spiritual traditions, The Manifesto lays out ten suggestions for living a freer life, and encourages readers to write their own manifestos.
From the book:
“I will not judge myself. I will be as gentle and compassionate with myself as I would with a friend…”
“It seems easy to fear the inner life, and the privacy and solitude required to nurture one. Many of us fill up our minutes with everything we can think of…”
“…there is no person whose primary relationships are simple and perfect…We are all flawed. We are all struggling.”
“To live in the present moment means understanding simply that we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“There is no way for the world to measure your wisdom or peace or understanding, your insight into yourself and your life…This dream will not be crushed by an indifferent world. Every small increment of understanding is a triumph.”
“Our great creations are our own lives.”
Praise:
“On the surface, the writing was boldly funny, and I never once felt alienated that the letters weren’t addressed to me directly. I knew they were for Colin Firth, for Katherine, for me, and for anyone else willing to take part in the journey they lay out. Over time, the letters reveal a quiet depth that sneaks in and spreads itself thick across each page. The density of it speaks for itself. Start reading for tea and trip to England, and stay for a run through the tar pits of grief.” —Nicole Oquendo, contest judge
“With language that is both frankly conversational and lyrically beautiful, Riegel trusts her wasps to Colin, and to us. On April 17th she writes, “Me, these days I’m as shameless as a god and as directive: I’m distributing flyers, wearing my own face on a t-shirt, carrying a big sign with an arrow pointing down saying Love me.” To admit such difficulties as asserting the desire for acceptance and love takes bravery, and Riegel’s honesty is just that—the kind of bravery that is too often confused with sentimentality or weakness, the bravery that Mr. Darcy and Lizzie Bennett must possess to set aside their pride and open themselves to love. This vulnerability and openness is generous; as a reader I am validated in my own emotional experiences and welcomed to join Riegel in the drawing room of her distress. In that place of unending, cyclical emotion she offers us the same comfort she receives from Colin Firth.” —Elizabeth Theriot, in a review for Black Warrior Review
“The letters are self-aware and recognize both the absurdity of their destination and also the fact that they’re more than just letters to Colin Firth…The chapbook, despite the poetry in its language and depth of its emotion, seems structured like a good rom-com with an ending to rival the best of them, allowing readers to hope for a sequel—starring, of course, Colin Firth.” —Kimberly Ann Southwick, in a review for the Ploughshares blog
From the book:
“I wonder what People magazine has had to say about you over the years? And is it easy for you to ignore whatever they say, to let all that go, to live in the secret revolutions of dark and light inside your own ribcage?”
“What do you need kept alive, what do you need touched gentle inside so you can bloom again?”
“Every day I get older and for some reason the world doesn’t panic.”
“Is that what happens when a marriage ends? Everyone dies but we go on anyway: disappearing, reappearing, falling. Our arms too heavy to keep up the old struggle, our new selves less delicate than we thought.”
“You never really know someplace until you’ve been there. Today at 1:42pm, I was there. Wherever happy is.”
“I have said this before but no matter where I go I am always leaving.”
Praise:
“The poems in What the Mouth Was Made For are mystical meditations, at once lyrical, tender, and profoundly felt, each poem flying directly into the heart. Indeed, if the heart had a mouth, these are the kinds of poems it would speak.” —Nin Andrews
“In this new collection, Katie Riegel tends ‘what must be tended.’ Line by line, with clarity enough to sting your eyes, she rekindles that tender and slightly crazed engagement with life that shaped us before we got used to the world. I found myself unjaded for hours at a time. These poems are fresh food for the head and heart, which is what poetry should be–and what most of us desperately need. Get this book. Get full.” —Tim Seibles
From the book:
KATIE-LESS
In a world without me, hundreds—no,
thousands—of people would have one less crush
in their lives. My friends
would have a name melting
in the back of their minds like a sugar cube,
a name they’d never learned but knew
despite logic. In a world without
me, stars would retreat
a short distance, considering their places
again; grass would stand watching
the road for something
to happen; trees would take
deep breaths and remain stoic.
Everything I love would be less
loved—and wouldn’t that
be a shame? Sometimes I think about
being a horse in a blue pasture, a hawk crying
my heart out to the wind. But I wouldn’t be
anything in a world without me, even less
than the first sweet molecules of hydrogen and oxygen
to touch your lips
when you tilt a glass of water back
to slake your thirst.
Praise:
“In Castaway, Katie Riegel writes of the haunting lights and darks of childhood, a place where ‘the corn is so tall a child could walk into it and disappear’ and winters where ‘sun strik[es] off ice like organ music.’ This is one of the few books of poetry that has a genuine heartbeat. You’ll swear you can even hear a pulse, or maybe that could just be your heart sighing and heaving as you turn the page. These poems nearly glitter with the sad-lovely sense that you can’t ever go home again, but in Riegel’s sure and steady poems, you will find a new, dear friend that will make an attempt so very worth your while.” —Aimee Nezhukumatathil
“In these haunted, green-drenched, and wind-blown poems set in the open plains of the Midwest, Katherine Riegel deftly wrestles with themes of erosion and impermanence: a home that is lost and now only exists as the idea of home, a family’s slow-motion unraveling, bodies lost to illness, and selves lost to time. A castaway from a lost paradise that can’t ever quite be gotten back to, the speaker in these poems mourns ‘the hard half-truth/of a child’s ownership–that whatever/one has can always be taken away,’ igniting a series of meditations on all that’s cast away, irretrievably lost, and sometimes–through an acceptance of the ultimate unrecoverability of things–unexpectedly returned to us in different incarnations. ‘You know yourself/what wounds is the same/for all of us,’ Riegel writes, and these are indeed poems of piercing clarity and compassion.” —Lee Ann Roripaugh
From the book:
LOST
Through fields of swaying grasses
that bloom and rise a dark flock
under monuments laughing in the earth and seeping salt
we ride in tiny open cars, in baskets, on sleds, on
horseback We navigate
gray trees capes catching ghosts in our hands
(they glow like fireflies) and still
we rove we move always moving
because sometimes a whisper crawls
towards us a tendril curling and grasping
prehensile It carries red stones on its tongue
It speaks of all
we have given away all we have yet
to know
and we want
to ask it questions to listen at night
our foreheads pressed to cold
windows
We want
nothing that we have We
want to stop We want to
arrive at the green river
where someone familiar will take us by the elbow
and help us board the glittering barge
All of Us (as editor) 
An anthology of poems published in the magazine Sweet: A Literary Confection during its first five years. This collection is varied and beautiful, answering the question, “What’s American poetry doing now?” with, “It’s partying.” In these pages, award-winning poets and those whose books we are still looking forward to mingle, chat, drink, dance, and get down to the business of making meaning with words.
