Maggie Hess

Rain Painter Maggie Hess

In these pages you will find 30 new poems by Maggie Hess, most of them written in 2019, and with ten pandemic poems from 2020. Rain Painter is one of Maggie Hess's most digestible and easy to appreciate collections. The writings of Maggie Hess can be bittersweet memoirs from the psychiatric ward, but her poetry tends to fall into a comfortable embrace with Nature. When asked why she mentions her bipolar, when her poetry rarely touches upon it, Hess says the diagnosis is who she is but in her eyes poetry should be beautiful and in observance of the things we all know as human. Hess believes everyone is so much smaller than Nature, we have to have a common experience. Over 40 poems of Maggie Hess appear in journals ranging from Tule to Blue Fifth to Skyhorse. Maggie won the Leidig Poetry Award judged by Linda Pastan and the May B Smith writing award and has self published numerous chapbooks. Maggie also recently won honorable mention in Wild Leek's Chapbook Contest judged by Ron Rash.