Praise for The House of Gathering: Using words as wands, the wildly talented artist, performer, visionary, mystic and magic maker Erica Sarzin-Borrillo offers a feast of life in all its stages and surprises. Here is truth telling wrought in poetic images and stunning cadence. The Goddess takes up residence in this potent book and the reader is never the same. - Jean Houston, PhD, author of The Possible Human Erica Sarzin-Borrillos mystical poetry awakens us to our divine essence. It inspires, consoles, and invites us to come home to the Eternal Lover and be the resurrection of this world. As with the passionate verses of Hafiz and Rumi, here is expression of the ecstatic love affair, rich with depth, humor, mystery and inspiration. This is poetry which is not created or manufactured, but birthed. In The House of Gathering you will experience fire, longing, benediction, and forgiveness, and you will want to plunge into these inviting depths again and again . . . - Jane Smith Bernhardt, author of We Are Here: Love Never Dies and The Sweet Conversation: A Guide to Spiritual Listening Ms. Sarzin-Borrillo has the most extraordinary gift of being able to describe the souls journey. Her poetry comes closer to expressing it than any writing I have ever experienced. Each piece is like looking at one of a thousand lights of the soul, each stimulating an inner sense that bring us closer to the truth of our own essence. We are lifted on word-wings that guide us inward to the awakening of our own soul-self. This poetry jump-starts that inner journey for those who have forgotten and for those who need reminding. - Robert Stempson, co-author of The Sixth Sense, Founder and Director of Programs for Human Development (PHD) and www.CTPsychics.com.

In Black Gathering Sarah Jane Cervenak engages with Black artists and writers who create alternative spaces for Black people to gather free from interruption or regulation. Drawing together Black feminist theory, critical theories of ecology and ecoaesthetics, and Black aesthetics, Cervenak shows how novelists, poets, and visual artists such as Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Clementine Hunter, Samiya Bashir, and Leonardo Drew advance an ecological imagination that unsettles Western philosophical ideas of the earth as given to humans. In their aestheticization and conceptualization of gathering, these artists investigate the relationships among art, the environment, home, and forms of Black togetherness. Cervenak argues that by offering a formal and conceptual praxis of gathering, Black artists imagine liberation and alternative ways of being in the world that exist beyond those Enlightenment philosophies that presume Black people and earth as given to enclosure and ownership.