sheila packa
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Poet Laureate for Duluth, MN (2010-2012)
Sheila Packa lives in northern Minnesota near Lake Superior. She has three books of poems, The Mother Tongue, Echo & Lightning, and Cloud Birds. Her poems have been in several anthologies, including Good Poems American Places (Viking Penguin, 2011), Finnish-North American Literature in English (Mellen Press, 2009) Beloved of the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude (Holy Cow Press! c2009) and To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets from Pre-Territorial Days to the Present (New Rivers Press, c2006). She has received two Arrowhead Regional Arts Council fellowships for poetry, an ARAC Career Opportunity grant (2007), two Loft McKnight Awards, (poetry 1986 and prose 1996) and a Loft Mentor Award in poetry (1995), and a Community Arts Learning Grant (2010).
She is the current recipient of an Arts and Cultural Heritage Community Arts Learning to do poetry and writing workshops for those in transition, with a special outreach to those dealing with domestic violence.
Sheila was awarded the 2011 Goldie Award for Poetry from the Golden Crown Literary Society for her book Echo & Lightning.
For more information about her work, visit her blog at sheilapacka.blogspot.com.
To view / listen to recorded work see her wildwood river vimeo channel and her poetry page.
read the recent article in the university of mn, duluth newspaper
read the recent article in the duluth budgeteer
new release
Migrations: Poetry & Prose for Life's Transitions
Edited with an introduction by Sheila Packa see: www.wildwoodriver.com
new titles
Clouds Birds
Cloud Birds is a breathtaking flight through the western shoreline of Lake Superior north to the Iron Range of Minnesota. The poems are about bears, immigrants, bird migration, and women moving through violence.
"The meditations and assembled memories in Cloud Birds dissolve layer after layer of the defenses we erect against eternal human fears and longings. Images from the North, from the Iron Range--bears and birches, roads that had 'no end, only yearning,' set the poems in place and motion. Often the poems do not end in a period: instead they leave us following their trail, "a thoroughfare of light falling through the pines." --Connie Wanek, author of On Speaking Terms (Copper Canyon Press, 2010)
"Cloud Birds is about bears, wings, migrations--and apples, anger, rivers, roots, coffee, fields, longing and always, always love. The collection is wonderfully liminal. It is richly shaded and shadowed, a translucent layering of meaning and memory, of dream and thistle. It moves between narrative and music, between aura and the most grounded reality. Many of the poems linger as sound as much as image. Some are ephemeral. Some are achingly immediate. The poems invite the reader to become part of the process. Trust the free fall of Sheila Packa's voice and imagination. This is the mystery and power of her work." --Pamela Mittlefehldt, PhD, co-editor of Beloved of the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude (Holy Cow! Press, 2009)
Midwest Book Review writes: The changing of seasons, the changing of life seems to move so much faster in the north. Cloud Birds is a collection of poetry from Shelia Packa, a Finnish American woman who calls Minnesota home, viewing the changing of nature and life as she sees it and always moving. Cloud Birds is an excellent compilation of poetry driven by both humanity and the beauty and uncertainty of nature. Cloud Birds: "we live on both sides of the border/in two countries/in and outside each other/bone and blood/in disguise without intention or force/without blandishments/blown by wind/silent like shadow crossing and crossing/over the boundaries without end/borne by moon or sun/burnished by wing."
Garrison Keillor read the poem "Not Forgotten," from Cloud Birds, on Writer's Almanac:
Featured here: writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2011/05/18
Available in bookstores.
ISBN: 9780984377725
Distributor: Ingram
$15
For more information about the book, see Sheila's blog
To purchase Cloud Birds online see: amazon.com
Echo & Lightning
Wildwood River announces the publication of Echo & Lightning (expanded version), a book of poems, by Sheila Packa. It's a love story as well as a story about migration and change. Sheila has had her work featured by Garrison Keillor on The Writer's Almanac and anthologized in To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets (New Rivers Press) and Beloved of the Earth (Holy Cow Press).
Kirsten Dierking (author of One Red Eye and Northern Oracle) writes: "So many poems in Echo & Lightning reveal what has to be given away in order to be filled with something greater--a more intense spiritual awareness, a fuller connection with the landscape, a more generous and all-encompassing love. Echo & Lighting transforms us into something freer, wilder, more given to loving, while reminding us that to fly is to risk leaving the old behind ... "
Ellie Schoenfeld, author of The Dark Honey, writes: "These poems are the story of following one's own instincts to, in one way or another, migrate. They bring us to the exact moment when we surrender to our truest selves, when we allow ourselves to be transported, transformed, resurrected."
The Northeast Minnesota Book Award reading team, May 2011 writes: "Lyrical, intimate, all while challenging your personal status quo or inertia. These poems by Sheila Packa evoke all the senses to come to attention - so you don't miss a single, heightened note. Written to be read to the voice of the cello, the experience of reading them to yourself is like swimming in very deep water (at night!)- exciting while pushing you beyond your present limits to LIVE more fully than you ever thought you might!"
Echo & Lightning won the 2011 Goldie Award for Poetry from the Golden Crown Literary Society.
Available in bookstores.
ISBN: 9780984377718
Distributor: Ingram
$15
Learn more about Sheila Packa at www.sheilapacka.com
To purchase Echo & Lightning online see: amazon.com
poetry / performance samples
see the poetry link to purchase books and cds and to read or listen to samples.
upcoming events
see the calendar page for a list of public events.
contact information
sheila packa
(218) 393-4218
email list
send an email to: sheila@sheilapacka.com to be notified of upcoming events.
quotes
"Packa's work is as earthy and gritty as the North Country that informs it....She writes in the vein of Tillie Olson or Willa Cather, a poetic style into which she incorporates that strength of the immigrant woman....She uses the strength drawn from the natural world to express an intimate femininity." --Beth L. Virtanen, PhD
"These poems
have wheels. They take a person to unexpected places and I, for one, am
thrilled to go there. Whether the landscape is the tender grittiness
of the Iron Range, the sensuousness of the body, or the complicated
terrains of memory and expression, these poems are something to write
home about. We are very lucky that she has sent them to us."
- Ellie Schoenfeld, author of Difficult Valentines
"These are truly poems grown in the North Country. Sheila Packa's poems
have an understanding of the poverty here, as well as the beauty."
- Louis Jenkins, author of Nice Fish and North of the Cities
"Tonight, with no hurry and no special agenda, I fell back into their
cadence quite easily, and they readily opened the rich contemplative
quality that has impressed me so deeply."
- Cecilia Lieder, publisher, artist
Anyone who has ever visited Northern Minnesota can identify with the expert metaphors and beautiful repetition of sounds of The Mother Tongue. The collection is divided into three sections, The Mother Tongue--narrative poems about her youth; Torrent--erotic love poems clearly influenced by the poet's past and homeland; and Fluency--narrative poems about finding love, both romantic and platonic. Describing herself as a "daughter of love," Sheila Packa transcribes her experiences coming of age and finding love in Minnesota's rural mining community. Packa sees herself as part of her surroundings toiling deep in the heart of an iron mine, professing her love to her Iron Range boyfriend, taking a dip in the rust-colored "Wine Lake." And yet, struggles with her Finnish heritage give her poetry the emotional distance needed for a foreign reader. As she comes to understand the cultural differences wich create a barrier between her and her mother, she writes, "We must go to make new/love and let the past go." At the same time, her poetry celebrates the past, her heritage, and the North, which provides "the iron in our veins." Packa has received two Arrowhead Regional Arts Council fellowships for poetry and two Loft McKnight Awards.
- Elizabeth Bance, Minnesota Literature Newsletter
The Fiction/Poetry/Drama reading group loved this beautiful collection
of poems. This 3-part collection includes 28 erotic poems, which sweep
the reader up by surprise, interspersed with Packa's reflections about
growing up as the daughter of a Finnish mother while living in the
economically stressed region of the Iron Range. While these are
personal explorations of identity and mother/daughter relationships,
the reader travels along easily and willingly for the bumpy ride.
- Reading committee for the Northeastern Minnesota Book Awards (2008 Honorable Mention for The Mother Tongue)
