Books by James
The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal
James Crews, editor of two best-selling poetry anthologies, How to Love the World and The Path to Kindness, presents an all-new collection of highly accessible poems on the theme of celebrating moments of wonder and peace in everyday life. As Crews writes in the introduction: "[A] deep love for the world is present in every one of the poems gathered in this book. Wonder calls us back to the curiosity we are each born with, and it makes us want to move closer to what sparks our attention. Wonder opens our senses and helps us stay in touch with a humbling sense of our own human smallness in the face of unexpected beauty and the delicious mysteries of life on this planet."
The anthology features a foreword by Nikita Gill and a carefully curated selection of poems from a diverse range of authors, including Native American poets Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Kimberly Blaeser, and Joseph Bruchac, and BIPOC writers Ross Gay, Julia Alvarez, and Toi Derricotte. Crews features new poems from popular writers such as Natalie Goldberg, Mark Nepo, Ted Kooser, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jane Hirshfield, and Jacqueline Suskin, along with selections from emerging poets. Readers are guided in exploring the meaning and essence of the poems through a series of reflective pauses scattered through the pages and reading group questions in the back. This anthology offers the perfect intersection for the growing number of readers interested in mindful living and bringing poetry into their everyday lives.
“Reading these hand-selected poems of wonder and awe is like being handed a bowl of ripe, sweet fruits—so enjoyable, so surprisingly different, so deeply nourishing.”
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of All the Honey and Hush
Kindness Will Save the World: Stories of Compassion and Connection
With essays, reflection prompts, and tips from award-winning poet and mindfulness teacher James Crews, learn how to integrate the life-changing practice of kindness into your own routine.
Kindness Will Save the World inspires reflection on one’s own life, how to find the positive in little moments, and how to radiate kindness to those around you. Read one of the 100 uplifting essays each morning or night and gain inspiration for the new day ahead.
With journaling prompts throughout and highlighted Kindness Practices, you are provided the tools to integrate the life-changing practice of kindness into your own life.
The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy
At a time when all of us need more connection and joy in our lives, James Crews offers a follow-up to his bestselling, How to Love the World. In this new anthology, readers will find uplifting, illuminating, and heart-filled poems by beloved writers that include Julia Alvarez, Marie Howe, Ellen Bass, Naomi Shihab Nye, Alberto Ríos, Ross Gay, and Ada Limón, as well as new and emerging voices. Presented in the same perfect-in-the-hand format as How to Love the World, the collection includes prompts for journaling and exploration of selected poems, a book group guide, bios of all the contributing poets, and stunning cover art by award-winning artist Dinara Mirtalipova. A foreword by Danusha Laméris, along with her popular poem “Small Kindnesses,” is also included.
“Our world desperately needs poems that help us come home to loving presence. You have in your hands an anthology with poems that directly nourish the spirit.”
— Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance
“This collection of poetry is soul food worthy of savoring. Each poem is a feast unto itself, delivering nourishment for the heart's greatest tenacity and generosity - so needed in our individual and collective lives. It is a banquet of blessings to which I will return often. Thank you.”
— Kristi Nelson, Executive Director of A Network for Grateful Living and author of Wake Up Grateful
“The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy is the book we all need right now to help guide us during this crazy time in living our lives with more kindness, compassion and joy.”
— Georgia Heard, author of A Field Guide to the Heart: Poems of Love, Comfort, and Hope
How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope
More and more people are turning to poetry as an antidote to divisiveness, negativity, anxiety, and the frenetic pace of life. How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope offers readers uplifting, deeply felt, and relatable poems by well-known poets from all walks of life and all parts of the US, including Inaugural Poet Amanda Gorman, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith, and others. The work of these poets captures the beauty, pleasure, and connection readers hunger for. How to Love the World, which contains new works by Ted Kooser, Mark Nepo, and Jane Hirshfield, invites readers to use poetry as part of their daily gratitude practice to uncover the simple gifts of abundance and joy to be found everywhere. With pauses for stillness and invitations for writing and reflection throughout, as well as reading group questions and topics for discussion in the back, this book can be used to facilitate discussion in a classroom or in any group setting.
James Crews has the perfect touch—the wondrous poems he selects, the spirits behind them, the relationships they hold with one another when arranged together, feel exquisitely right. This is a book we needed right now—and how. How to Love the World is for every one of us—adolescents, teens, adults—who welcomes or misses the fullness of joy and the wholeness of days. As with Crews’s first landmark anthology, Healing the Divide, don’t buy one copy, buy ten. You’ll need them.
—Naomi Shihab Nye, Young People’s Poet Laureate, Poetry Foundation
Poetry is my drug of choice, and I tell people that if they think they don’t like poetry, it’s probably because they haven’t found their poet yet. You’ll find lots of poets to love within these pages, and you’ll also find invitations for reflection and for writing poems of your own. How to Love the World is exactly what we need in these times–or in any.
—Elizabeth Berg, author of I’ll Be Seeing You and The Story of Arthur Truluv
Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection
In this first landmark anthology, lovingly edited by James Crews, you’ll find poems to treasure by Mark Doty, Ross Gay, Donald Hall, Jane Hirshfield, Joy Harjo (our nation’s first Native American Poet Laureate), Linda Hogan, and many others. These poets, from all walks of life, and from all over America, prove to us the possibility of creating in our lives what Dr. Martin Luther King called the "beloved community," a place where we see each other as the neighbors we already are. Healing the Divide urges us, at this fraught political time, to move past the negativity that often fills the airwaves, and to embrace the ordinary moments of kindness and connection that fill our days.
“‘Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness,’ Tolstoy wrote in looking back on his long and imperfect life. These words with which he encased the most immortal truth of the human heart open poet James Crews's wondrous anthology Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection—a tender, truthful mirror held up to what is best in us amid a culture that so readily caricatures us at our worst.”
—Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
Every Waking Moment
In Every Waking Moment, James Crews plumbs his past and family life for insights, yet always returns to the moment at hand, approaching the world with mindfulness, openness, and clarity. He finds the miraculous in a shaft of sunlight while waiting for the subway, in an eagle glimpsed from a train along the Hudson, or in the fields of sweet corn surrounding his house. Crews reminds us over and over in this meditative new collection: "You must / put yourself in the path of joy / to find it.”
“His poems have gotten better and better, something all poets wish for.”
—Ted Kooser, American Life in Poetry
Bluebird
Bluebird is a wide-ranging and open-hearted chronicle of the poet's life on an organic farm with his husband in rural Vermont. Written with clarity and attention to the moments that make life memorable, Crews urges us in his newest collection "To live unbound by time/and mind—to grow, speak, touch and taste/at a pace that feels more real.”
“Crews’ poems have a tidal sweep as he moves between the universe within and the world without until every word becomes transformative and our ideas about life, and death, are made larger. This is a book that loves the world.”
—Jesse Lee Kerchevel, author of America, That Island Off the Coast of France
Telling My Father
In Telling My Father, James Crews explores familial bonds, memory, and grief through a beautifully written collection of poems. This Cowles-Poetry-Prize-winning manuscript is a risky, bold, and elegant exploration of coming of age against a backdrop of profound loss.
“The poems trembled like first light on a calm surface—no showy linguistic tricks, just lyric moments, a life revealed in its imperfection and grace.”
—Diana Whitney, San Francisco Chronicle