a deep dark black ray of sunshine (20th anniversary omnibus): a collection of creative writing
Julie was eleven years old when she wrote her first poem.
What came after was less a straight line than a river: English and writing teachers she survived and teachers she loved, like a college professor who assigned Langston Hughes, Alice Walker, and Richard Wright, and changed the way she understood what poetry could carry. It was that class that moved her to write her own collection. One of those poems, “Six (Decades),” is a villanelle dedicated to the African American writers of the 20th century. She wrote it at nineteen.
In 2001, the poem won her a publishing contract at the International Society of Poetry convention. Two years later, Julie Kirsten published a deep dark black ray of sunshine.
The Collection
a deep dark black ray of sunshine omnibus is a collection that spans more than twenty years of writing. It includes the 2003 original—a debut born from a competition win and a nineteen-year-old’s certainty that language, properly arranged, could hold almost anything. It continues through two decades of poems written in the spaces between everything else: a design business, a marriage, a family, graduate school, and a publishing imprint built from the ground up.
The omnibus also includes “Viking Blood,” the personal essay that earned Julie the Hermann Schmeling Award for Nonfiction Writing from Southern Oregon University in 2014, a piece about what it means to carry two cultures, two languages, two versions of home inside a single life.
Poetry has always been where she goes when prose is not enough. This collection is the record of that, of a writer learning, over twenty years, when to follow the rules and when to break them beautifully.
Six (Decades)
Beauty’s sweat conjures infallible sin–
Deserts drifting survive natural heat–
Breathe in, breathe out the colors of your skin.
Centuries’ tales speak of wars with no wins–
Oceans weeping die in fated defeat–
Beauty’s sweat conjures infallible sin.
Conquering heroes find their souls as tin–
Mountains seeking will collapse as they meet–
Breathe in, breathe out the colors of your skin.
Complex memories of interracial kin–
Valleys starving find rebellion to eat–
Beauty’s sweat conjures infallible sin.
Cradles of discourse roll and scratch their chins–
Nights sleeping on day’s ethereal seat–
Breathe in, breathe out the colors of your skin.
Counting minutes until God lets them in–
Skies dancing the years on their merry feet–
Beauty’s sweat conjures infallible sin.
Breathe in, breathe out the colors of your skin.
About the Author
Julie Kirsten Kanta is the founder of Plumb Creative Books and the author of a deep dark black ray of sunshine. She holds a B.S. in English from Southern Oregon University and an M.S. in Book Publishing from Portland State University. Her writing has been recognized by the International Society of Poetry and the Hermann Schmeling Award for Nonfiction Writing. She lives and works in Grants Pass, Oregon.
The Making of This Book
The 2003 edition of a deep dark black ray of sunshine was published through a small print-run contract. It was my first published book, and it taught me nearly everything I know about what it means to hold a finished object in your hands and feel both proud and certain you would do it differently now.
In 2023, I released the 20th anniversary edition under my own Plumb Creative imprint. That version added new poems and gave the collection a design that finally matched what the writing felt like to me. The omnibus collects all of it—the original, the new work, and the essay that connects the two—into a single volume.
Purchase the Book
a deep dark black ray of sunshine began as a villanelle written by a nineteen-year-old at the International Society of Poetry convention, and won a publishing contract. The 2003 debut was Julie Kirsten’s first book. Twenty years later, she republished it with new poems and a design that finally matched the work. This omnibus collects it all: the original poems, two decades of poetry written in the spaces between everything else, and the personal essay that earned her the Hermann Schmeling Award for Nonfiction Writing in 2014.
This limited signed edition is only available in the Plumb Creative Books bookshop.
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