Ruth Nolan is an author based in California's Mojave and Coachella Deserts. A former seasonal wildland firefighter for the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management throughout the Western U.S., she is now professor of English and Creative Writing at College of the Desert in Palm Springs, CA. Her fiction appears in LA Fiction Anthology: Southland Stories by Southland Writers (Red Hen Press, 2016), and she's most recently published poetry/prose in The James Franco Review; Angels Flight Literary West; Desert Magazine/USA Today; and her short story "Palimpsest" won an honorable mention in Sequestrum Magazine's 2016 Editor's Reprint awards. She's also published work in Rattling Wall; Desert Oracle; Women's Studies Quarterly; New California Writing-Heyday Books; Lumen; Pacific Review; Rhino Baby; Poemeleon and The Desert Sun. She writes feature articles about California desert culture and the environment for KCET/Artbound Los Angeles; Inlandia Literary Journeys; News from Native California and Sierra Club Desert Report. She's the editor of the critically-acclaimed anthology No Place for a Puritan: the Literature of California's Deserts (Heyday Books, 2009, ) now in its second printing. She holds her M.F.A in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California, Riverside-Palm Desert Low Residency M.F.A. program, and her M.A. in English from Northern Arizona University. Ruby Mountain is her debut poetry chapbook. She can be reached by email at ruthnolan13@gmail.com.
So at one are Ruth Nolan's poems with the arid landscapes which both nurture and haunt her that geographic space magically becomes psychic space, and distance a metaphor for the uncommon emotional and intellectual range of Ruby Mountain. The separate dramas of erotic love, parenting, and the grief and confusion that follow suicide are all here. As true dwellers of the Mojave and Death Valley know, to say this book embraces the beauty of the desert is not to say that it is empty but rather that it contains everything. -B.H. Fairchild, author of Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest and The Art of the Lathe Ruby Mountain is a striking collection of spirit-poems, a testimony of love, for oneself, others, and for the ragged landscapes of home-in this case, the sexy badlands of California's sweltering Inland Empire. Nolan's poems are searing snapshots of the lives, psychology, and emotional terrains we navigate, in the name of survival, sanity, and community. Each poem is a beacon in the desolate spaces, those quiet moments, when we find ourselves contemplating our own purpose. -Tim Z. Hernandez, author of Skin Tax and All They Will Call You In the end, Ruth Nolan's Ruby Mountain is a collection that sings to the landscape of life, through the landscape of life. Her voice is the Wildrose Canyon, the red tailed hawk and his pretty hills, Eagle Mountain, the Badlands blue dragonflies and April's endless sky. But everything has its season, and life always and inevitably moves into loss. Above all else, these poems keen like widows at windows. They haunt the edges of grief. They are their own ghosts. -Jill Alexander Essbaum, author of Necropolis and Hausfrau
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