THE GODDESS OF BURNING HAIR
by Mary Mackey
The Goddess of Burning Hair is the first complete collection of Mackey’s goddess poems spanning more than fifty years. Written from 1972 to 2025, the thirty-seven poems in this book emerge from a lifetime Mackey has spent studying, listing to, respecting, and giving voice to the spirit of Gaia the Great Mother in all her forms. Lyrical, tender, fierce, brilliantly written, sometimes prophetic, and informed by both lived knowledge and scholarship, these poems bring alive a world both ancient and not yet born.
Here you will find poems about goddesses from Europe like Medusa and Aphrodite; Afro-Brazilian goddesses like Iemanjá, and Yansã; goddesses Mackey has invented like The Goddess of Burning Hair; goddesses who have created themselves and goddesses who are a combination of the research of scholars like Marija Gimbutas and Mackey’s own imagination taken from her four novels about the Goddess-worshipping/Earth-centered cultures of Neolithic Europe. You will encounter prophets like Cassandra who speak warnings no one believes; and last, but by no means least, poems that celebrate those moments when the power of the Divine enters us, moments when we mortals become transformed into something greater and more powerful, and the Earth our Great Mother speaks through us.
Copies of The Goddess of Burning Hair can be purchased from Bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon.com
“Passionate, informed by lived knowledge and scholarship both, there could be no more perfect volume to inaugurate and welcome into existence a new publishing house devoted to women’s spiritual experience.”
— Jane Hirshfield, editor of Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women
“What a life! What a voice! What a writer! Fifty-three years of brave and passionate dances with Goddesses have gifted Mary Mackey, revered author of the Earthsong novels, with astonishing richness of vision and heart. This glorious torrent of tales, chants, aphorisms, myths ancient and new, raptures charming and wild, bears witnesses to the endless creative and transformative gifts that the Divine Feminine offers us all.”
— Annie Finch, author of Spells: New and Selected Poems
IN THIS BURNING WORLD: POEMS OF LOVE AND APOCALYPSE
by Mary Mackey
In This Burning World: Poems of Love and Apocalypse offers readers 64 new, beautifully-written, profound poems by Mary Mackey, winner of the 2019 Eric Hoffer Award for Best Book in the United States Published by a Small Press. In this stunning collection, Mackey unflinchingly imagines the future we will face as the Earth’ s climate changes, while at the same time offering readers inspiring poems that describe how mutual aid and love can preserve hope and joy in even the most difficult of times.
Copies of In This Burning World can be purchased from Amazon.com or Independent Publishers Group
Praise for In This Burning World: Poems of Love and Apocalypse
“In This Burning World is a visionary epic that turns devastatingly intimate. William Blake is here as is Hiroshima, but the prophetic arc is Mary Mackey’s alone. How do we negotiate an apocalypse when the enemy is the self, when we have known for centuries where our path leads? There can perhaps be no answer, but Mackey inhabits these questions with a fierce exemplary responsibility. Her poems are invested with the sacred energy of the natural world whose destruction she can’t endure. Her book is incandescent. You won’t forget it.” — D. Nurkse
“The world needs more Mary Mackey.” — Richard Wiles, President of the Center
for Climate Integrity
“Mary Mackey’s poems are powerful, beautiful, and have extraordinary range. May her concern for the planet help save it.” — Maxine Hong Kingston
“Intensely lyrical, profound, brilliantly written, and always accessible, these poems ask us not only to imagine what the world will be like as the Earth’s climate changes, but how we can preserve joy and compassion in times of catastrophe.”
— Pamela Berkman author of Her Infinite Variety and The Falling Nun
“Mackey’s crisp-edged perceptions are set down in these poems with a sensuous, compassionate, and utterly unflinching eye.” —Jane Hirshfield
“Think of Cassandra, when not believed, going mad and singing love songs so beautiful Apollo would have died for them if he could. Mary Mackey, one of our very finest poets, is not mad, and her new book In This Burning World has such power and beauty it would make any god envious.” —Rafael Jesús González, First Poet Laureate of Berkeley, CA
“Ecosphere Studies is in its early stage with Mary Mackey’s poems.”
—Wes Jackson, Founder of the Land Institute
“Mary Mackey is a national treasure.” —Tulsa Book Review