Kris Whorton
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Everyday Omens
by Kris Whorton
ISBN: 978-1-962405-67-6
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kris Whorton is the author of the poetry collection Alchemy (2023). Originally from Boulder, Colorado, she has lived in the South since 1997. She teaches creative, scientific, and professional writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where she also served as assistant director of the Meacham Writers’ Workshop. Her poems, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in journals and anthologies. Whorton holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Rainer Writing Workshop and has worked with teens, adults, and incarcerated writers in Hamilton and Bradley County Jails. She lives in the woods with her husband and two Australian shepherds.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Kris Whorton’s Everyday Omens traces a life’s journey through intimate moments of family, childhood, and personal transformation. The poems move between places––from suburban America to European cities, along Alaskan shores to Southern forests––revealing a speaker navigating complex relationships with parents, brothers, and lovers. Childhood trauma casts shadows while nature offers solace. Birds, water, and changing seasons become metaphors for the passage of time and emotional landscapes. Through precise imagery and unflinching honesty, these poems explore resilience, the search for belonging, and the courage to forge one’s own path despite––or because of––what has been inherited and endured.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
Kris Whorton’s Everyday Omens is imbued with fresh insight as she explores memories of childhood to adulthood and back again in artful lines. This collection is a poignant reminder of both the joys and insecurities of growing up, as it seeks to understand how we are to navigate the past. Whorton is a gifted poet who sees clearly the many miracles that are too often overlooked, and she reminds readers in “A Strange Relief” to “fill your pockets / with apple blossoms. Make your own golden rules.” These poems are a balm for the soul, and they are worth reaching for again and again.
––KB Ballentine, author of All the Way Through and Spirit of Wild
Set in the everyday, Kris Whorton’s Everyday Omens explores the struggle against familial and societal expectations, as well as those of her own creation. Most at home in the natural world, she finds her greatest healing in communion with the outdoors, whether hiking with her dogs, tending to a baby chick, sitting beside a stream, or walking in the woods. Redemption comes through a recognition of interconnectivity with the other-than-human: “On this January day, crisp and chill, / a snowflake’s edge, no birds /cut the dove-colored sky, no lonely cow / lows. Only Guinness, my dog, / pants softly at my side, our breath, / made crystalline, tinkles / just beyond my hearing” (“Winter Walk”).
––Pamela Uschuk, author of Refugee
