In Broken Blossoms, dead fish become roses, a Chinese restaurant’s duck soup teaches us to “love the meat, broth, and the bones” and shattered ’60s love beads become seeds, become daisies. The mundane, tragic, ugly, and the beautiful are all here. Hurtt was a hospice RN most of her working life…the need to remember and to be remembered is a lesson she wishes to honor every day. Many of the “hand me down” stories she heard are now poems of lives not to be forgotten.
Read these poems carefully…they may initially feel simple until delving into a deeper reading. In a time when empathy feels lacking in both our personal and national lives, Broken Blossoms‘s poems are a way to connect ourselves into a more humane community, see the world fresh and new, and live on this planet worth savoring and saving.
Hurtt’s poems are the work of a caregiver, a nurturer, a poet that sees in the world those same offerings of care and attentiveness brought to the senses in the common scenes of everyday life.
Aaron Abeyta, former Poet Laureate of Colorado’s Western Slope
This collection considers the ability to find wholeness from broken bits, solace in grief, and sincere joy in the wonderous blossoms offered to us each day, if only we take the time to notice.
Laura Pritchett, winner of the PEN USA Award in Fiction
Plunge into Hurtt’s mysteries, where pain and beauty are equally precious, as each needs the other to heal and be whole. The book proves again and again that the broken can still bloom.
–Kim Stafford, Oregon Poet Laureate 2018-2020
Hurtt’s poems become acts of faith that life, even at its end, is “still full of promise.”
Margaret Rozga, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2019-2020
Beneath these minimalist poems are whole worlds of feelings.
Benjamin P. Myers, Oklahoma Poet Laureate 2015
Get a copy of Broken Blossoms for yourself, and another for someone who needs a little tenderness.
Donna Hilbert, author of Threnody
Broken Blossoms is a tender walk through transformative experience.
Debra Magpie Earling, author of The Lost Journals of Sacajewea
Hurtt finds the healing balm, the connection, and the knowledge that “we carry on / even as we ghost away” and gifts it to us in striking images that only the most observant of poets can conjure.
Brenda Cárdenas, Milwaukee Poet Laureate 2010-2012
Maryann Hurtt
Retired after thirty years working as a hospice nurse, Maryann Hurtt has also been a cook, museum guide, social worker, bus girl, and writer. She is especially passionate about environmental issues and spent twenty years researching her Once Upon a Tar Creek Mining for Voices book. Her poetry has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of Net awards. She savors stories of resilience as she hikes, bikes, reads, and writes in Wisconsin’s Kettle Moraine, then wanders unfamiliar places.