Image Description: Front cover of Bluewords Greening featuring a grid of floral illustrations in soft, muted tones.

About Bluewords Greening: A poetry collection that explores motherhood, language, grief, and renewal through intimate encounters with illness and loss. Divided into two linked sections, the book centers first on a mother’s engagement with her child’s altered speech following a rare epilepsy diagnosis, treating the child’s fragmented “bluewords” as both evidence of rupture and sources of unexpected lyric beauty; the poems listen deeply to how meaning persists even when language falters. The second section turns toward pregnancy and recurrent miscarriage, drawing on art, science, and Hildegard of Bingen’s idea of viriditas—a life‑giving greening force—to imagine regeneration without denying sorrow. 

Praise for Bluewords Greening:

“In a wrenchingly difficult and confusing situation, Christine Stewart-Nuñez has found the wherewithal to make not only meaning but beauty out of unremitting challenges.  Her ally and her weapon: poetry. Bluewords Greening presents, preserves, and enacts awe, curiosity, tenderness, sensuality, and an endless loving engagement with the world.  These poems bear witness; they also lull, celebrate, interpret, and play.  This book is an inspiring achievement.” —Rachel Hadas, author of Questions in the Vestibule

About the Author:Christine Stewart‑Nuñez is an American poet, essayist, and professor of English, widely recognized for writing that weaves together motherhood, disability, science, art, and spirituality. She served as South Dakota Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2021 and teaches at South Dakota State University. Stewart‑Nuñez is the author of several acclaimed books, including Untrussed and The Poet & the Architect. Her work often engages interdisciplinary dialogue and has inspired collaborations across visual art, music, dance, and architecture.