Our Mother, the Mountain

By: Alexander Shalom Joseph

Narrated by: Alexander Shalom Joseph

Up here in the wind rip and the nine month winter, between the pines and the aspens and the hollows and the cliffs, there are some who have chosen to hide out, to call these high alpine hills and valleys home.

This is a collection of words written at above 9000 feet, about the life up here, all of which were originally published in a weekly column in the local newspaper, The Mountain Ear. These flashes of beauty chronicle the subtle, rich beauty of living and working in this world—in skillfully scrolling moments stitched together by hand and imbued with the unique tones and mood of the high country life.

©2022 David A Martin (P)2023 David A Martin

Critic reviews

"Alexander Joseph has added great depth to poetry’s snowpack at 9,000 feet in these Indian Peaks. His cold meltings wildflower the thoughts of an earned solitude. He wears the mood of weathers like a favorite sweater. In these days of pandemic and war-threat stress these wonderful prose poems remind us to look up and within the healing of a life lived close to Mother Nature." —Mike Parker, author of Kimono Mountain

"In these, the strangest of times, Alexander Shalom Joseph has lashed himself to the mast, apertures jammed wide open and utterly permeable to our careening world." —Logan Hebner, author of “Southern Paiute: a Portrait,” and Director of the Zion Canyon Mesa Residency Center

"Perhaps now it can be no other way: the poem that praises the founding of a house is also the elegy that mourns the same house’s loss.So it is we have a small book that honors the fire we live by—the sun—and knows other fires threaten opposite ends. The conflagration. By the light of one fire, we gather together a life; by the light of another, we gather every object of care we can hold, and then we run. I suspect many readers of this volume will be sure to gather it—a little good company by which to build the next house, and the next world." —Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Variations on Dawn and Dusk

A beautiful journey through the seasons

I have enjoyed this book of poetry for some time, but listening to the poet read his own work is transendant. I enjoy listening to it right before I fall asleep. It makes for lovely dreaming.