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Dining on Salt: Four Seasons of Septets
by Wayne Lee
80 poems / 138 pages
Price: $22.95
Publisher: Cornerstone Press
ISBN #: 978-1-960329-85-1
To Order: Cornerstone Press or Amazon
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ABOUT THE BOOK:
Wayne Lee’s Dining on Salt: Four Seasons of Septets is a hybrid memoir in verse that tells a story of love, loss and recovery composed entirely of septets written during a 12-month period during which Lee’s disabled wife Alice took her life. As her long-time husband and caregiver, Lee had to cope with her suicide and learn to reinvent himself. Dining on Salt is also an in-depth exploration of the septet form, with 20 of the 80 poems written in traditional forms, along with two well-researched appendixes that encapsulate the history and variety of seven-line forms.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
“The 80 septets in Dining on Salt capture tender care for an ill spouse and her subsequent death. These are lines of grief and going on. Rather than feeling contained, each septet has space enough to widen into understanding.”
–Lauren Camp, New Mexico Poet Laureate and author of In Old Sky
“Wayne Lee’s Dining on Salt is a powerful collection of elegiac, lyric septets. The poems map a journey through caregiving, loss, healing and renewal: “such a small task, so brief the work / to inhale the scent of the world / to savor it and let it go …” Potent with the concision and directness of haiku, Lee’s seven-line form is also expansive enough to carry the weight of grief. His moving tribute to his late wife shows us a way of moving forward, day by day, poem by poem, toward healing, toward “a window thrown open / all the world blowing through.”
–Alicia Hokanson, author of Perishable World and Mapping the Distance
“Wayne Lee’s stunning and original new work, Dining on Salt: Four Seasons of Septets, is a full-length exploration of loss, using the septet poem (7-lines, including examples of 21 traditional septet forms) as a channel to his inspiration. The book begins with meditations on nature, companionship, aging and the environment, but abruptly becomes a memoir in verse about his wife’s sudden death. These are short exhalations of grief, but also of timelessness and beauty. He generously allows his words to evolve into a broader lament for the planet: birds become totems of consolation and connection. He writes from the edge of a koi pond: Some grief must be drowned in small words and soft sounds. Yet these evocative and insightful septets aren’t just gestures of bereavement, but ruminations on an uncertain future with its mutable landscapes and sudden joys. At their best, his poems reveal how Each of us is born one loss at a time.”
–John Macker, author of Belated Mornings and Desert Threnody
“Stepping into Wayne Lee's septets offers a breath of living. Any loss or regret or grief becomes a burnished gold.”
–Hiram Larew, author of This Very Much
“This collection is so exciting and rewarding! Wayne Lee gave himself to the discipline, demands and richness of the septet form, and he invites us to be equally inspired. The research Lee did is impressive, and his well-crafted poems provide insights into the joys and challenges of caregiving. I was deeply touched by his love and vulnerability, his spiritual practices, and his rich poetic sensibilities. This wonderful collection will touch the reader in unexpected ways.” –Mary McGinnis, author of See with Your Whole Body
“One of the remarkable septets in Dining on Salt opens on a simple moment: We share this quiet morning space / in peace, the sleeping cat and I. Images of morning light follow–the cobalt vase, / the purple buds that look a bit like / lilacs, my blue-veined hand and then this: All I ask is to see, / to breathe inside this mystery. Here, in eighty poems of seven lines each, Wayne Lee’s request is granted. He sees into the mystery of grief and the heartbreak of loss, and shares these shimmering moments with us.”
–David Meischen, author of Caliche Road Poems
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Writer, editor and teacher Wayne Lee (wayneleepoet.com) lives in Santa Fe, NM. Lee’s poems have appeared in Tupelo Press, Slipstream, The New Guard, The Lowestoft Chronicle, Writer’s Digest and other journals and anthologies. He was awarded the 2012 Fischer Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and four Best of the Net Awards. His collection The Underside of Light was a finalist for the 2014 New Mexico / Arizona Book Award and his Buddha’s Cat: Poems was published by Whistle Lake Press in May 2024. Lee’s collection The Beautiful Foolishness is forthcoming from Casa Urraca Press in 2026. Lee is the founder and host of the online Tuesday Poetry Practice community.
FROM THE BOOK:
A Word from Grandmother
by Wayne Lee
Each day on my forest walk I pause
to press my palms against her skin,
the wrinkles on the backs of my hands
miniatures of her great ridges and ravines.
Each day I wait like that until she speaks,
blesses me with a single-word benediction.
Yesterday it was peace. Today it is patience.
Kumbhaka
by Wayne Lee
(Sanskrit for “the retention of the breath
in the hatha yoga practice of pranayama”)
In that scant pause between breaths,
after you push the air from your lungs
and before you pull it in again–
that is when the miracle occurs.
We die so many deaths on our path, but
always we are reborn. I spent a billion years
in the bardo learning to turn stone to flesh.
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