Touchstone Readers Norah Smith and Sam Marcotte got to talk to NH poet Patrice Pinette about her new book Happiness is a Strange Bird and her poetic practice. They also got to talk about three poems from the new book.

Patrice Pinette received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. In the Connections Program of New Hampshire Humanities, she facilitates book discussions with adult learners of English from all over the world. She also leads poetry workshops in the Transdisciplinary Studies in Healing Education program at Antioch University New England, and Center for Anthroposophy’s Renewal Courses. Patrice’s poems have appeared in literary journals and anthologies including Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality & the Arts, Touchstone Journal, Poet Showcase: An Anthology of New Hampshire Poets, Allegro Poetry Journal, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

About Happiness is a Strange Bird, 2025 from Bee Monk Press:

Purchase Happiness, A Strange Bird on Amazon As primal and fearless as myth, or a great blue heron touching down in a snowstorm in Manhattan, the “strange bird” of this book perches at the edge of Eden, winging to us as if out of memory or the voice in the wilderness we dream has awakened us. Patrice Pinette’s poems, glowing and unholdable as a child’s chased bubbles, limn the mystical both in the ineffable and the domestic. As laden with questions as a “deluge of grief” with tears or peonies with petals, they bow down while we are uplifted, filling with hope and hunger—not so much for answers as for more of the dangerous, playful, momentary encounters with wonder we’re reminded of. Elemental as rain, as magnolias, as love, the color blue, or happiness, these poems transport us as we watch them soar, line by line “dazzling the ordinary.” Alice B Fogel, New Hampshire Poet Laureate Emerita Author of Falsework

An excerpt from the conversation: “. . . in these times we’re in, as you know, language is in a troubled state. The idea of having reverence and a clarity around truth, to have spoken word come from the heart to the heart, that can’t be taken for granted. And I know that what you two are doing… with many other writers and artists and good folks serving others, are keeping words alive as expressions of soul and of your deepest truth.”