Books by Heidi Lynn Nilsson

For the Fire from the Straw • Barrow Street Press • 2017

For the Fire from the Straw‍ ‍is the second poetry collection by Heidi Lynn Nilsson and her first full-length collection, published by Barrow Street Press in 2017. Known for its intense exploration of the divine and doubt through themes of violence, lust, and love, often with a hunger for spirituality and a blend of intellect and physicality. Nilsson’s poems are praised for their lyrical beauty, complex language, and spiritual searching, often compared to the work of Emily Dickinson or Gerard Manley Hopkins.

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“In Straw for the Fire, Theodore Roethke writes that ‘straw can feed a fire to melt down stone.’ The poems in Heidi Lynn Nilsson’s For the Fire from the Straw  burn with this kind of metamorphic heat. They rove—ruthlessly, metaphysically, beautifully— through the realms of doubt, belief, marriage, motherhood, injustice, and transgression without ever once using their brilliance against the reader or resorting to oversimplified piety.”

—Lisa Russ Spaar, Area Program in Poetry Writing / UVA

The Math of Gifts• Slapering Hol Press • 2016

The Math of Gifts ‍is the first poetry collection by Heidi Lynn Nilsson, published by Slapering Hol Press in 2016. The Math of Gifts won the Singer-Sargent Award from the Hudson Valley Writers Center and was published by Slapering Hol Press.  Poems from this collection have also appeared in several literary publications, including Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and AGNI. 

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Works in Progress

In addition to Nilsson’s two published collections of poetry— For the Fire from the Straw and The Math of Gifts— Nilsson is currently working on two novels. Her first novel is set in Belle Époque France, Saint Monet ; it explores the cost of devotion—to art, to another person, to the construction of self—through a story about vision, memory, and what we lose when faith fractures. Her second novel currently in progress,Wasn’t Water,is an adaptation of The Volsunga Saga, which examines what it means to mother a child into a world made terrible by human power. Both novels are animated by what early reviewers identify as Nilsson’s “feminist subversion of religious convention.” Her protagonists refuse to choose between the body and the spirit, between sensuality and the sacred, between the pleasures of this world and hunger for the next.