By Karen Luke Jackson
Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock): 2026.
Paperback, 102 pages
Reviewed by Anne Waters Green
Karen Luke Jackson’s new book joins three earlier volumes of poetry, GRIT, If You Choose To Come, and The View Ever Changing, each of which draws readers into relationships. GRIT allows us to meet her beloved sister, a woman who overcame challenges by taking on the role of professional clown. In If You Choose To Come, Jackson shares her deep ties to the beauty of the natural world, especially the mountains of western North Carolina. The View Ever Changing asks the reader to contemplate family and the power of place. Using both poetry and prose, her new book, You First: A Love That Will Not Let Me Go, invites us to dive ever deeper into relationship. Bravely and candidly, Jackson favors her readers with reminiscences of some of her most profound experiences. We learn of her sometimes unsettling spiritual encounters over several decades, experiences that she long held close and now offers to those fortunate enough to open this book.
Jackson is a poet. Her writing, whether in form, free verse, or essay, shimmers with lyricism. She is a thinker. Her work invites us to a place of contemplation. She is a scholar. Her writing provides the reader introductions to places, such as Iona and Assisi; practices, like walking labyrinths (“One’s first labyrinth is not unlike one’s first love”); and saints long dead, including Clare, Julian, Teresa, and Hildegard. There is much to learn here, as evidenced by the lengthy bibliography and detailed end notes. Lovers of poetry, as well as poets, will appreciate her skillful use of form (the familiar sonnet and the lesser-known Japanese form, haibun) and free verse. Those who prefer prose will delight in her longer autobiographical stories, such as “Sacred Meadows,” in which she describes leaving time and space while sitting at the bedside of a dying friend, an event she later learned to call “numinous” or “unitive.”
Most of all, this book contains the writings of a woman earthbound enough to treasure music (“if there are other lifetimes“ and “Frozen Music“) and to esteem the elders who went before her (“A Litany for Ancestor Wisdom“), but mystical enough to commune with the divine, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes with headlong passion (“Only Once Did I Ask You to Leave”).
The title poem, “You First,” recounts three unsought visitations and ends with these lines:
I would have gone mad
Had I not heard of
Juian, Teresa, Hildegard.
You First is a book by a woman who has lived a full and sometimes incongruous life. It’s a book for women who ache to harmonize the physical world in which they live and the spiritual world they sometimes sense and often long for. “A Parallel Life” contrasts the cloistered life of an imaginary woman born Catholic in Italy or Ireland who has been wed to the church with that of a woman born in the American South and wed to a life of driving carpools and delivering Meals on Wheels.
I believe Jackson’s book will resonate with many women who have wondered, “What if?”
“A Parallel Life” ends with these lines:
And in
that other life I might have fled my vows
as I did in this one, but I never
would have mother’ed a daughter who feeds
hungry children. A son who pictures
mountain ridges flushed in rhododendron.
Although seekers, both willing and hesitant, may find it difficult to integrate their inner and outer selves, this luminous collection delivers the welcome message that it is possible. Readers will be grateful to Karen Luke Jackson for sharing her experiences in verse and essay. Her writings call to mind the words of Teilhard du Chardin: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
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© 2026 by Christian Feminism Today
