Radiantly We Inhabit the Air. Number Five in the Robin Becker Chapbook Series, selected by guest judge Eloise Klein Healy.

Publication date: January 21, 2011 [125 copies]
ISBN-13: 978-0-9829396-3-5
27 pages, 5 x 6.25 inches
$ 9.00

Christina Hutchins teaches graduate students poetry, theological aesthetics, and the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Judith Butler at Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley. In 2010, in addition to the Seven Kitchen Press’ Robin Becker Prize, she was awarded the Editors’ Prize in Poetry from The Missouri Review and The National Poetry Review‘s Annie Finch Prize. The author of Collecting Light (Acacia Books, 1999) and The Stranger Dissolves (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2011), her poems also appear in many periodicals, including Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Denver Quarterly, The Missouri Review, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, Salmagundi, and The Southern Review. She lives in Albany, California, where she serves as the City’s first Poet Laureate.

Being Read 

We aren’t the only readers. While mist studies
the shower door, clear drops page down your skin.
Shape-notes in a stream, we’re clung by curiosity.

Packed sands memorize undulating shapes of the sea;
grasses spell out a grainy sun. Steep a second
cup of tea. While architects

erase the firmament, ducks in waddle-lines
jam the riverbanks and pray. There is so much ardor
under ink. Behind my mother’s house, toads’

two-toned voices massage the air. Sometimes the same
rains stalk several bookshops: the toads’ sepia skins,
a tin cup full of creek, our ladled thirsts.

More poems online by Christina Hutchins:

• “Why We Need to Be Together” in Big Ugly Review
• “Interregnum” (poem & podcast) at The Missouri Review
• “The Music Inside,” “After Sappho,” & “Remainders” at Switchback