Here's Company

Here's Company celebrates moments when the word we replaces I. Here lyric poems invite you to share secrets, hopes, dreams, hugs, word-play, and memories while the recent isolation of a pandemic and threatening wars lurking in the background make company especially precious. Ranging from the first spare glimpses to more expansive meditations, these poems celebrate such company as that of a homeless woman bringing cheer to passing drivers, a poet and a designer of earthenware who, without ever meeting each other, make similar artistic moves, an instrument "you have to love," and a loved one's "A-440" of dependable tuning. These are poems to read aloud, poems of resilience, poems that reveal the joy we can share through our language.

Muriel Nelson’s publications include the poetry collections Sightsinger (Encircle Publications) and Part Song (Bear Star Press, Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize), and chapbooks, Please Hold (Encircle Publications, Poetry Chapbook Award) and Most Wanted (ByLine Press, By-Line Chapbook Award). These and three book manuscripts were shortlisted in four national contests and finalists in seventeen. Nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize, Nelson’s poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Guesthouse, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hunger Mountain Review, New American Writing, Painted Bride Quarterly, Ploughshares, Smartish Pace, and other journals as well as in several anthologies. Two of her poems have been set to music. She holds master’s degrees from the University of Illinois School of Music and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and lives in Federal Way, Washington.