Christianne Balk is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Bindweed and Desiring Flight. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the Atlantic. She lives in Seattle, where she writes and teaches creative writing. She travels frequently into the Cascade Mountains.

Books by Christianne Balk:

Other poems on the web by Christianne Balk:
"The Kitchen Shears Speak"

Christianne Balk's Website.

Christianne Balk According to Wikipedia.

About The Holding Hours:

"It's always a pleasure—a delight, actually-when a book makes its claim on our attention—admiration, actually—within the first few pages, and that is exactly what happened as I read The Holding Hours.With the beautiful, unsentimental clarity of a trained naturalist, Christianne Balk traces her daughter's maturing in and against the landscape of the Pacific Northwest, which she also loves.The Holding Hours is a superb achievement."
—Alison Hawthorne Deming

"Grief and beauty. Page by page, we're pulled into ecosystems of the heart more deeply than the clear surface of these poems leads us to expect. And that's the triumph of this book, for me: how clarity and restraint and the poet/biologist's precise vision can hold so much."
—Linda Bierds

"Caught between the naturalist's way of knowing the names of things and the poet's way of loving their nameless essences, Balk writes with precision and care about the hunger for the sacred that lies in all things. Hawkweed, Husqvarna, a disabled shepherdess, and John Muir's fever dwell here in a brilliant array of forms. A book to savor and celebrate."
—Andrew Hudgins