These poems travel through mining excavations and waterways vulnerable to environmental contamination and climate change in Minnesota, where the Northern Continental Divide crosses the Laurentian Divide and creates three watersheds that flow into the Mississippi River, the Great Lakes, and Hudson Bay. These are stories and images, historical and contemporary, about people who arrive or are displaced, whose language is replaced by another language, and who find a fluid space full of gaps, silence, and possibility.

“In Surface Displacements, the spirit of the ancient Finnish shamans breathes again. Sheila Packa’s best early poems recalled her youth on Minnesota’s Iron Range, growing up in households where Finnish was still spoken, where the immigrant towns were gritty working-class, in a landscape of mine pits, forests, and water. That environment remains her fundamental source, though now everything has changed, changed utterly, as Packa has learned, with increasing confidence, to incorporate history, science, and myth, even as her language has grown more musical, her poems more spiritual. Like the old shamans, she has become a shapeshifter, able — through the dreamy trance of poetry —to speak in the voice of a snail, rivers and lakes, an entire landscape and its people.” —Bart Sutter, author of So Surprised to Find You Here

“There is a beckoning, a teaching, a singing and lamenting in Sheila Packa’s Surface Displacements. In rivers, headwaters, displacement and the otherworld we are given ways of navigating earth’s trauma in the sink and rise of all that is broken, all that survives. Whispers, dialogues, and the power of forgotten language are forged in the stellar poetic title poem that speaks of both beauty and loss. This is an important book of place, that calls out truth, journeys into landscape, history and the natural world. Ancestry runs through this book as challenge and praise, a way of naming that offers “the tongue with the old root.” Packa dives into the body of language and voices the body of the earth with skill and relish. “To speak is to mend” is an invitation to us all in this intimate and compassionate calling out of the elegant and fragile wonders of this world.” —Diane Jarvenpa, author of The Way She Told Her Story and The Tender Wild Things

“Surface Displacements is a Lake Superior epic, an Iron Range chronicle, a Northland saga in which the human psyche merges with rock and water. This book has a heartbeat, and its rhythms are those of Great Lake seiches and flooded open pit mine waves. This poet’s practice is not only one of noticing but also of becoming, as self and landscape merge. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that humanity and geography have always been one, and Packa’s words remind us of what we know in our bones: that life is movement, displacement, and constant “shift(s) from state to state”; and also that we are connected to a core of belonging forged from earth and spirit. These gorgeous poems are incantations of legacy, deep roots, disturbance, destruction, flight, and transformation.” —Julie Gard, author of Home Studies

"Through the art of attention, Sheila Packa elevates the landscape of northern Minnesota to the holy. Each poem is a room rich with texture, imagery, and sound that resonates long after one puts the verses down. This is a book to simultaneously lose oneself and find oneself in." —Darci Schummer, author of Six Months in the Midwest

Thank you to the following organizations for grant support for various aspects of this project:

Sheila Packa was a fiscal year 2022 recipient of a Creative Support for Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity was made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. She was also a fiscal year 2020 recipient of an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Sheila also received an Individual Artist Career Development grant from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council in 2015. This activity is made possible in part by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council, thanks to appropriations from The McKnight Foundation and the Minnesota State Legislature and general and arts and cultural heritage funds.

This book project, originally titled Three Rivers, was also made possible with the support of a grant in 2016 from Finlandia Foundation National, www.FinlandiaFoundation.org. Finlandia Foundation National invites applications for its grants program, which awards funds to projects related to Finnish-American and Finnish history, heritage, preservation, arts and culture.

Available in bookstores.
ISBN 978-1-9477873-6-0
Distributor: Ingram
$16

To purchase Surface Displacements: bookshop.org

These poems are about the Iron Range in Minnesota, the Vermilion Trail, and they are stories of travel and derailment about mining, radical politics, unionizing, accordion music and strong women. The book brings together history, geology and the community of people with iron in their veins.

Sheila Packa, the granddaughter of Finnish immigrants, grew up near Biwabik on the Iron Range. She has three books of poems and has edited an anthology of seventy-five Lake Superior regional writers. She has been a recipient of two Loft McKnight Fellowships, one in poetry and one in prose. She has also received fellowships and funding support for projects from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council. She served as Duluth's Poet Laureate 2010-2012. More information is available at sheilapacka.com.

"I excavate these words from a vein of iron….” these poems are “test drills and core samples” — a weave of memory, archive, dream, song, story — drawn from the history and people of the Iron Range of northeastern Minnesota. These pages sound the whistles and roar of the mines, the dust in the lungs, the dangerous crossings into a new language, the accordion’s breath. Culled from violence and tenderness, bone and ash, ore and light, they map a place, a time, a journey through love" --Pamela Mittlefehldt, PhD and co-editor The Heart of All That Is: Reflections on Home Holy Cow! Press

Available in bookstores.
ISBN 978-0-9843777-7-0
Distributor: Ingram
$15

To purchase Night Train Red Dust: bookshop.org

For more information about the book, see Sheila's blog

Cloud Birds is a breathtaking flight through the western shoreline of Lake Superior north to the Iron Range of Minnesota. The poems are about bears, immigrants, bird migration, and women moving through violence.

Chosen

"The meditations and assembled memories in Cloud Birds dissolve layer after layer of the defenses we erect against eternal human fears and longings. Images from the North, from the Iron Range--bears and birches, roads that had 'no end, only yearning,' set the poems in place and motion. Often the poems do not end in a period: instead they leave us following their trail, "a thoroughfare of light falling through the pines." --Connie Wanek, author of On Speaking Terms (Copper Canyon Press, 2010)

"Cloud Birds is about bears, wings, migrations--and apples, anger, rivers, roots, coffee, fields, longing and always, always love. The collection is wonderfully liminal. It is richly shaded and shadowed, a translucent layering of meaning and memory, of dream and thistle. It moves between narrative and music, between aura and the most grounded reality. Many of the poems linger as sound as much as image. Some are ephemeral. Some are achingly immediate. The poems invite the reader to become part of the process. Trust the free fall of Sheila Packa's voice and imagination. This is the mystery and power of her work." --Pamela Mittlefehldt, PhD, co-editor of Beloved of the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude (Holy Cow! Press, 2009)

Midwest Book Review writes: The changing of seasons, the changing of life seems to move so much faster in the north. Cloud Birds is a collection of poetry from Shelia Packa, a Finnish American woman who calls Minnesota home, viewing the changing of nature and life as she sees it and always moving. Cloud Birds is an excellent compilation of poetry driven by both humanity and the beauty and uncertainty of nature. Cloud Birds: "we live on both sides of the border/in two countries/in and outside each other/bone and blood/in disguise without intention or force/without blandishments/blown by wind/silent like shadow crossing and crossing/over the boundaries without end/borne by moon or sun/burnished by wing."

Garrison Keillor read the poem "Not Forgotten," from Cloud Birds, on Writer's Almanac:
Featured here: writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2011/05/18

Available in bookstores.
ISBN 978-0-9843777-2-5
Distributor: Ingram
$15

To purchase Cloud Birds: bookshop.org

For more information about the book, see Sheila's blog

Wildwood River announces the publication of Echo & Lightning (expanded version), a book of poems, by Sheila Packa. It's a love story as well as a story about migration and change. Sheila has had her work featured by Garrison Keillor on The Writer's Almanac and anthologized in To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets (New Rivers Press) and Beloved of the Earth (Holy Cow Press).

Kirsten Dierking (author of One Red Eye and Northern Oracle) writes: "So many poems in Echo & Lightning reveal what has to be given away in order to be filled with something greater--a more intense spiritual awareness, a fuller connection with the landscape, a more generous and all-encompassing love. Echo & Lighting transforms us into something freer, wilder, more given to loving, while reminding us that to fly is to risk leaving the old behind ... "

Ellie Schoenfeld, author of The Dark Honey, writes: "These poems are the story of following one's own instincts to, in one way or another, migrate. They bring us to the exact moment when we surrender to our truest selves, when we allow ourselves to be transported, transformed, resurrected."

The Northeast Minnesota Book Award reading team, May 2011 writes: "Lyrical, intimate, all while challenging your personal status quo or inertia. These poems by Sheila Packa evoke all the senses to come to attention - so you don't miss a single, heightened note. Written to be read to the voice of the cello, the experience of reading them to yourself is like swimming in very deep water (at night!)- exciting while pushing you beyond your present limits to LIVE more fully than you ever thought you might!"

Echo & Lightning won the 2011 Goldie Award for Poetry from the Golden Crown Literary Society.

Available in bookstores.
ISBN: 9780984377718
Distributor: Ingram
$15

To purchase Echo & Lightning : bookshop.org

Learn more about Sheila Packa at www.sheilapacka.com

Marrow, Muscle, Flight chronicles the everyday infinite affections of a gay man interacting with his children, creating a home with and grieving the death of his partner, and finding again how "the fierce river in the heart begins to flow." These poems celebrate the sacrament of the body and chant the rituals of longing and loss; they explore how each life is imprinted with family secrets, the journey of forgiveness, the "long sigh of belonging," and hands that know each other by heart. Boelhower invites us to feel the "soft wind full of salt from the infinite sea," hear the songs in our "bones, hollow flutes for a symphony of luster," see "white gulls dance their feathered alleluias down wide aisles of jubilant dawn." These poems evoke the courage to "fling yourself open toward the horizon."

Marrow, Muscle, Flight received a Midwest Book Award for Poetry in 2013.

Gary Boelhower, PhD is a professor of theology and religious studies at The College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota, where he teaches courses in ethics, thanatology, spirituality, and leadership. He is the co-founder of the Center for Spirituality and Leadership at Marian University in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.

Available in bookstores.
ISBN 978-0-9843777-4-9
Distributor: Ingram
$15

To purchase Marrow, Muscle, Flight : bookshop.org

According to an ancient Greek story, the god Chaos was the first to emerge at the creation of the universe. Soon after her came Gaia (Earth), Tartaros (the Underworld) and Eros (Love). In many versions, Chaos then gave birth to the Birds. From the primordial depths of time, from Chaos herself came these winged first beings. This wild birthing created migrations and flight. In more recent times, soon after Darwin published his book, "On the Origin of the Species", scientists began a heated debate about the origin of birds. Most scientists today believe that birds are one of the few remaining descendants of the dinosaurs. In our own brief Anthropocene era, we are witnessing a rapid increase in the rate of extinction. We are in a geologic epoch marked indelibly by a human-created, asteroid-scale period of rapid loss of life as we know it on the planet. This planetary devastation is moving very quickly now. Soon birds quite possibly will be swallowed back into some primordial chaos. Or perhaps these small winged dinosaurs will survive another wave of extinction - another geologic era and we will be the ones whose wax wings burn. I created a film generator called the graffiti angel to express a stuttering before god - an infinite resistance / a relentless howl or noisy elegy - a way to respond, to witness. The "origin of birds" exhibit first appeared at the Prøve Gallery in Duluth, MN in 2014. The physical installation has a companion interactive web site (originofbirds.blueboatfilms.com). The origin of birds mixes image, sound, data, text and a live twitter stream to create a video collage / a multi-sensory torrent. The physical installation includes multiple projections, live performance, and QR code "portals" into the interactive web environment. I am hoping to create a story "swarm" - an immersive river. The online website allows you to drill-down into individual text, image and sound pieces of the larger work - an immersive dive into the wreck - grief and ecstasy, a queer flame, a sanctified rejoicing amidst the rubble of it all.

To purchase origin of birds: bookshop.org

» learn more

This book is a companion to an abstract, experimental film also called "night train / blue window." The abstract film and text both center on the ill-fated efforts of a bird named pullman to turn back time to before that day in 1914 when the last passenger pigeon, Martha, died in a cage in the Cincinnati Zoo. Kathy McTavish is a cellist, composer, and multimedia artist.

Gary Boelhower writes: "Part of my meditation this morning was night train/blue window. This book is a searing song of loss, grief flame, black hole whole and somehow, somehow, somehow hope. In the reading and seeing, your body may become cage bound, zoo lost, saddened with each dry seed to keep the body's light flying against the dark. You may come to remember that you are holy flame holy wheel holy holy holy. You may learn to say the name of Martha as the sun breaks or moon shines, to say the name of Martha for all of us who are carriers. McTavish gives us the story, the hymn, the lamentation, the praise song, the train, the blue window. This train will take you... "

Available in bookstores.
ISBN: 978-0-9843777-5-6
Distributor: Ingram
$15

To purchase night train / blue window: bookshop.org

read and listen to night train / blue window companion media material

Composer, cellist and multimedia artist Kathy McTavish writes about her music and experimental film. This book features sequences of black and white photo images from the film birdland, photographs of cello performance and includes a long poem, or score, for her unique fusion form.

This book was companion to a site-specific solo installation created for the George Morrison Gallery at the Duluth Art Institute. This multi-channel sound & video exhibit ran from 2012-01-18 until 2012-04-08.

Available in bookstores.
ISBN: 978-0-9843777-5-6
Distributor: Ingram
$15

To purchase birdland: bookshop.org

read and listen to birdland companion media material

Migrations: Poetry & Prose for Life's Transitions features of the work of 75 Lake Superior area and northern Minnesota writers. The book is edited by Sheila Packa, Duluth Poet Laureate 2010-2012. Included are many accomplished writers (Connie Wanek, Ellie Schoenfeld, Deb Cooper, Gary Boelhower, Linda LeGarde Grover, Ryan Vine) and excellent new writers. Each writing captures a moment of change. These changes range from having a new baby to death of a loved one. Some have written about aging, children growing up, illness, bird migration (including a bird being trapped and a bird that doesn't want to migrate), leaving a relationship, moving through violence (several poems, and one specifically about her sister's murder from a domestic violence), and also actual migration (one leaving Argentina during the terror there), and moving back and forth from Minnesota to work in Antarctica. You will love the strong and beautiful collection that shows we are all birds in a larger pattern of migration traveling back and forth from memory to new beginnings.

Available in bookstores.
ISBN 978-0-9843777-3-2
Distributor: Ingram
$15

To purchase Migrations: bookshop.org