From the pen of beloved poet Luci Shaw comes a new collection that celebrates inspired creativity as an antidote to chaos. The poet’s own words best describe the heart of this pinnacle collection of new work by beloved writer Luci Shaw: Entropy: A measure of the molecular disorder, or randomness, of a system, its lack of order or predictability, resulting in a gradual decline into disorder.  Our universe, and the systems within it, constantly shift from their created states of order towards disorder, or chaos. The second law of thermodynamics asserts that entropy, or disorder, always increases with time. Creative human activities such as art, architecture, music, story or film are human efforts to halt and reverse this loss of meaning. Thus, smaller systems, like individual poems, become highly ordered as they receive energy from outside themselves, from the poet. They reverse entropy because they are moving from a state of disorder (all the random ideas, words and phrases available to the writer) into an orderly form designed by the writer to create meaningful images and concepts in the reader’s mind (which is where the word “imag-ination” comes from.) This transfer of images, concepts and ideas into the mind of a reader is the task of poetry and the calling of the poet. Just as a composer of music gathers rhythms, notes, melodies, or harmony, organizing them into fugues or sonatas or concertos, so poets work and write to discover ways of arranging their responses to the world in words that introduce meaning and beauty in the mind of the reader.  Which is what I’ve been trying to do for most of my life.  "In her newest collection, Reversing Entropy , Luci Shaw sings a “benediction/of beauty” where “[g]race comes in every/gather of green” and “contraries...join all the making/and remaking/within the fluid universe.” Her rituals of observation and creation—be it hiking, knitting, photography, or writing—interweave the natural and spiritual. In these wise and wondrous poems, the poet ponders how to hold onto memory and how to let it go. Beginning with her affirmation “the body, that ancient house for the soul... spins toward ultimate healing,” she also meditates on faith, relationships, and aging, allowing space for grief and questions. Most essentially—in a life that chooses energy over entropy—Luci Shaw celebrates creatures, creatives, and the Creator, vowing “to live like the cedar tree in the psalm/....to never/let the years hinder my going and my growing.” May it be so. Reversing Entropy astutely mentors us for a thriving and enduring life." — Marjorie Maddox, author of Begin with a Question  “Every lost word will recall its meaning,” Luci Shaw begins in this, her latest volume, all “restored to its place in a poem.” How often she has reminded us that what “seems mundane and trivial may show itself to be a holy, precious part of a pattern,” I think of the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins when I enter her poems. How often she has captured the light shining in and through the things of our world, her scintillant music transforming what is there before us, there in the stars and at our feet in the sand and pebbles and motes around us. With her photographer’s trained eye she humbly reveals again and again the incredible abundance of God’s plentitude. And for that gift, so gracefully and abundantly bestowed, I thank and praise her." — Paul Mariani  " Reversing Entropy incarnates what Luci Shaw’s long life gives record to: that all things are transformed, from leaf to dirt, from lost words to new poem; from shadow to light. For her the order of the universe is the re-ordering of disorder. Luci Shaw’s poems and life have been lived in faithfulness to the gift of the world around us, a gift intimately connected to the gift of words, to the making and remaking that goes on and on. She is a woman utterly open to the annunciations of starlight, to the “music” of fragrant lilies of the valley, to the exuberance of spring green leaf-light." She has lived her life according to one abiding principle: let wherever you find yourself be a place of opportunity rather than disappointment. These new poems exemplify what it means to be present, to live in a state of readiness for whatever comes next." — Robert Cording   "Those who love Luci Shaw's earlier poems will find in these a familiar, welcoming openness to the light that shines from every leaf and the voice that speaks in wind. In these her attentiveness to the created order extends to other dimensions of awareness—of her own longings and losses, of the scope of small pleasures, of how acceptance gentles the challenges of aging and of the learning that happens in moments of letting go. Images and words linger long after putting the book down and widen like ripples on waters disturbed by a soft breeze."— Marilyn McEntyre ,  author of  Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, When Poets Pray , and  Speaking Peace in a Climate of Conflict  "In Reve