BOOKS | Prose & Poetry

In over five decades of consistent work, Laura Chester has written multiple works of prose-poems, poetry, fiction and non-fiction. A sampling follows. Anthologies she has edited can be found here.

Recent works are available where all fine books are sold. Copies of several books may also be purchased from the author.

Holy Personal
Looking for Small Private Places of Worship

Indiana University Press, 2000

Foreword by Thomas Moore
With photographs by Donna DeMari

Laura Chester documents the American landscape as well as the American soul, as she and photographer-friend, Donna DeMari, traverse the continent looking for small, private places of worship. From a chapel made of tires in Alabama, to one fashioned from a wine cask in Sonoma, California, from a root cellar shrine in Boston, to a stupa tower on Whidbey Island….

Holy Personal furthers the idea of honoring our differences, while being mindful of our oneness. It bears witness to a yearning for religious privacy, a deep desire to create for oneself a holy chamber, a place where creative expression joins hands with devotion. Luminous photographs by DeMari reveal the intimate nature of these unique places.

From the Foreword by Thomas Moore:

“To me this book is a compendium of holy magic, a lost yet vital art for anyone who would take religion out of the attic of intellectualism, down to the earthen floor of felt and meaningful spirituality. Laura’s book represents the best way of doing theology—keeping it relentlessly human and thoroughly concrete… The ultimate effect of a worthy spiritual life would be beautiful lives in a beautiful world. This beautiful book is an excellent start.”

—Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul; Soul Mates; and Dark Nights of the Soul

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“Holy Personal is a fascinating, in-depth study of how spirituality can express itself in that most intimate of worlds, the home.”

—Publisher’s Weekly

“Chester’s decision to build a small chapel on her New England land eventually led her to write this intriguing and beguiling book. Inspired by her decision, she sought out similar private chapels across America. With photographer Donna DeMari, she has captured something of their essence. Here is the little storefront worship space called All Is Welcome Temple in Mississippi, just up the river from the tiny vodun temple of Priestess Miriam in New Orleans. Here, too, are a miniature Scandinavian stavkirke, or ‘stave church,’ in Wisconsin; a Guadalupe chapel in New Mexico; a Mother Goddess altar in San Francisco. Each was built to honor the presence of the divine in the midst of life, and each offers its quirky delights, whether because of its mundane constituent materials (e.g., the Chapel Made of Tires), its mode of creation (a Moonlodge was dug by the hands, literally, of women), or its location (e.g., the Garage Chapel). Look out for a surge in chapel building, if this book really takes off. 

—Patricia Monaghan, Booklist

“In Holy Personal, two dozen devout souls speak about their handmade sanctuaries, many of which shelter images of Mary and various santos. It is clear water from the artesian well. From a Moonlodge in New Mexico to a Sandstone Cathedral, to a Garage Chapel, we follow the artistic devotions of those not bound by the doctrinaire, but are instead freshly cut by the thorns of the Mystical Rose, who are overflowing with gratitude—this last being one of the holy proofs that Spirit has in fact visited the longing soul. The photographs by Donna DeMari are worthy of long meditations.”

—Clarissa Pinkola Estes for The Bloomsbury Review

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Sparks

The Figures, 2002

With photographs by Donna DeMari

Sparks marks the second collaboration (after Holy Personal) of author Laura Chester and photographer Donna DeMari. Here, prose poetry and sepia-toned photographs combine to tell a story.

EXCERPT | “THE SPARK SO quickly becomes the fire becomes you. Your face is shining with the light all around, like a mane. Aura, luster, a polished egg. Eager and willing to bend the saplings, weigh them down, to cradle the candle flame within. Get out a match. The tent of kindling safe in its bunk of sand and stone. Or is it just this that excites us, leads us on, illicit touch. The torch is lit— it shines in the iris. Warm beeswax and sherry wine. What draws us here to our private shed, to our lair in the woods— (is chocolate.”
—from Part One

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Kingdom Come

Creative Arts, 2000

It was the worst Christmas of her life for many reasons. With the discovery of her husband’s infidelity, and her children’s painful rejection, Joanna Hawkins leaves her comfortable life on Beacon Hill and heads west. Here she takes over her aunt’s small cattle ranch, and rediscovers her teenage flame, Sam Mendoza. Kingdom Come is a contemporary eastern/western with a La Traviata twist, fast-moving, heartbreaking fiction, Chester’s best to date.

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“Chester depicts the randomness of the universe as a life-shattering force in this deeply satisfying and mature work.”

—Booklist

“A hypnotic literary technique, a liberating ethic and a feminine metaphysic, desire pulsating in the everyday. The sheer accuracy of her prose entices the reader to take this art purely on its own terms.”

—Eric Mendelson, American Book Review

Find it at City Lights Bookstore ✴︎ Amazon

Bitches Ride Alone

Black Sparrow Press, 1991

Laura Chester’s previous work of fiction, The Stone Baby, was compared by the San Francisco Chronicle with Elizabeth Bowen’s The House of Paris: “If Bowen were still alive, she might envy the frankness with which Chester is able to write about sex, childbirth and the gut-tugging bond between mother and child.”

In the serial short fictions of Bitches Ride Alone, Chester returns to familiar terrain. With equally unguarded candor, she wryly and ruefully examines the tension between the idealism of desire and reality’s inevitable shortfall.

Her female protagonists often experience difficulties in finding stable moorings with the opposite sex, chronicling bittersweet memories, fantasies and longings, but their accounts are delivered with such delightful dark humor, one story leads quickly to the next like a box of delicious chocolates.

In stories such as “First Base Boyfriend,” “The Most Handsome Man Who Ever Lived,” “The Never Enough Club” and “The One Thing You Can’t Have,” the characters inhabit a world of glamour and privilege, and yet courage and honesty are the dominant qualities here.

Despite her skepticism about the permanence of passion, Laura Chester continually tells us that it is worth it, as she discovers over and over again, new hope. My love, her narrator affirms in “The Final Simplicity of Love,” is simply like a good weather prediction that gets even better when it comes true in my head.

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“It is the exuberance of this collection that is its most charming feature. Loose and lanky, the prose seems to thrive on rawness and recklessness… Chester’s best writing comes from a radical girlhood—curious, impatient, impetuous and alive.”

—Review of Contemporary Fiction

“This narrator invents a free-flowing, associative style, at once a hypnotic literary technique, a liberating ethic and a feminine metaphysic, desire pulsating in the everyday. The sheer accuracy of her prose entices the reader to take this art purely on its own terms.”

—American Book Review

“This is powerful stuff, often beautifully obscure, with undercurrents that constantly tug at the shoals of sanity.”

—Booklist

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In the Zone

Black Sparrow Press, 1988

In the Zone is Laura Chester’s own selection of poems, prose poems, and stories from 1970 to 1988, the first two decades of her career. Erotic, dreamlike, they constitute the personal history of a literary sensualist.

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“This is powerful stuff, often beautifully obscure, with undercurrents that constantly tug at the shoals of sanity.”

—Marie Kuda, Booklist

Find it at City Lights Bookstore ✴︎ Amazon

My Pleasure

The Figures, 1980

A peopled poetry, an overlapping of internal/external voices, dialogues, riffs, back-to-back talking, similar to the semiconscious linking of the twilight reverie, what we go to sleep on, the prickling of memory, audial and surface phenomenon.

EXCERPT | HOLDING THE LEASH

From all that’s absorbed within the emotional circumference, certain moments seem to stick and come back

in the replay. Having composed themselves during a stage of gestation, they arrive as a naturally selective

synthesis. The movement here is similar to the semiconscious linking of the twelight reverie, what we go to

sleep on, the prickling of memory, of audial and surface phenomenon. Updating a history to the present,

pronounceable, each unit distracts from the previous, moving on, and yet all are held together as mixed motion

in time, like a day in the life of any nurturer. A peopled poetry, an overlapping of internal/external voices,

dialogues, riffs, back-to-back talking, word gestures traveling off in opposite directions, until they must meet

and release and reform. The personal edge-- not just one particular life, but an inclusive poetry. And so the drama

resounds here in multiple, taking us beyond the isolation of “I” familiar to the poetic vision, into a gathering of many,

lodged in a tight, interior space, until it seems something must give, or... submerging, resurfacing, we sing the song

fresh, almost without knowing that the toys we can’t break are the voices that people us.

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Hiding Glory

Willow Creek Press, 2007

Illustrations by Gary A. Lippincott

First in a series of imaginative children’s books, this is the wild tale of a small blue horse named Glory, (guardian of the morning glory vine), who takes Turner Flint off to the land of Joya. Here they must fight the Kermudgins, a tribe of terrible tidy-uppers, as well as an even more lethal foe. This charming narrative, illustrated by Gary Lippincott, delves into the many challenges that face young girls, from jealousy, loss and sadness, to overcoming fear. A sequel, Marvel the Marvelous, the story of a girl and three pink ponies, is also available.

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Marvel the Marvelous

Willow Creek Press, 2008

Illustrations by Gary A. Lippincott

Kids love reading about horses, as the popularity of National Velvet, Black Beauty and even the My Little Pony series can attest. Now, in Marvel the Marvelous, writer and editor Laura Chester shares her lifelong love of horses in a new fantasy novel for kids ages 8–12.

In a story sure to entrance young animal-lovers, Little Marvel, a magical pink pony that transitions to purple, helps to rescue a lost child, Lee Rumsey. In the company of Garbanzo and Beanie, a mastiff and pug, they set off from Northern Joya, so that Lee can make her way home. On their journey, they encounter a wildly torrential river, a polluted cave system, and a disturbing, dark presence called Spigot-Von-Glume. Lee and Marvel also outwit a dreadful creature that threatens to suck up their very souls. The novel features dramatic black and white illustrations by award-winning fantasy artist Gary A. Lippincott.

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The Story of the Lake

Faber & Faber, 1995

At the turn of the century, Nogowogotoc Lake was considered the Newport of the Midwest, where some of the most affluent families from Milwaukee and Chicago spent their summers in luxurious “cottages” at the water’s edge. The Story of the Lake weaves the tale of four of these families over the course of generations. With each decade another net of history, prejudice, love and intrigue is cast over the surface of the water, creating a more and more intricate pattern.

Joseph Ulrich of Kreuser Beer and his rival, “Pork Packing Prince” Walter Schraeger vie for the hand of Alicia Bosquet, flamboyant newcomer to the scene. Isabella Wells, the reclusive heiress to Milwaukee’s finest department store, becomes dangerously involved with Margaret Sanger’s early Planned Parenthood crusade, while her sister, Helen, tries to protest the end of Prohibition, a force too great to contend with in the beer loving city of Milwaukee.

This often dark and disturbing American drama is full of gusts of lake air, filling the senses with images and traditions that have mostly slipped away. A personal retelling of family secrets as well as a reflection of the times, The Story of the Lake, is the big passionate family saga that finally gives the Midwest its due.

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“This sweeping American saga follows the destinies of four wealthy Midwestern families who spend their summers on fictional Nogowogotoc Lake in Wisconsin. The story opens at the turn of the century as 14-year old Isabella Wells is washing a statue in a garden of larkspur, dahlias, roses and phlox, when a dog appears with a half-dead capon in its jaws—an apt metaphor for the intrusion of life’s ugliness into the beauty-filled existences of these founders and heirs of beer, dairy and department store fortunes. Chester’s supple prose and eye for sensuous period detail capture well the rhythms of life and death at the lake. She makes it clear through the characters’ joys and suffering that, contrary to Fitzgerald, the rich aren’t different from you and me—and are worthy of the attention and compassion that she lavishes on them in this fine novel.”

—Publisher’s Weekly

“The Story of the Lake is a beautifully told tale of families and generations, loves and jealousies, and ordinary people of a charmed time and class. It is full of poignant insights and emotions, just the kind of subtle storytelling we need… I also deeply appreciate a story that presents family in its fullness—the light and the dark, the blessings and curses…”

—Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul, Soul Mates, Dark Nights of the Soul

“The historical scope of the novel is wide, the cast of characters epic. We are in the able hands of a highly omniscient narrator who is especially intriguing when exploring the minds and motivations of her female characters—such as the infamous Alicia Bosquet, who manipulates social mores to her advantage or defies convention if it gets in her way—the Scarlett O’Hara of the 20th Century Midwest.”

—New York Newsday

“The Story of the Lake is a fully created world. The characters and events are drawn with such clarity and compassion that we will all see ourselves in them. This is a book to curl up with. Pray for rain.”

—Sherrill Jaffe, author

“This panoramic narrative manages to accommodate a fascinating range of lives, making the history of Wisconsin’s beer baron class a vivid tapestry. The lucid grace of Laura Chester’s writing is always a singular pleasure.”

—Robert Creeley, poet

Signed edition available from the author.

The Stone Baby

Black Sparrow Press, 1989

Infidelity and sexual obsession, birth and loss are the dominating themes in this frank new novel, The Stone Baby. Julia Chapin, an aspiring painter, with three small sons, is swept away on the wings of compulsive sexuality, money and charm.

Chester’s lyrical, sensual prose, precisely charts the evolution of a doomed relationship, from its first erotic rush to sobering disillusionment, all along the way revealing how profoundly women support one another during terrible times.

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“It’s a fine achievement, the best thing of its kind since Elizabeth Bowen. If Bowen were still alive, she might envy the frankness with which Chester is able to write about sex, childbirth, and the gut-tugging bond between mother and child.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“A compelling, beautifully written book, poetic and dreamlike.”

—Lyn Lifshin

“In the description of the violence done against women and the nurturing that women provide for each other, Chester displays her most powerful writing.”

—The Berkshire Eagle

EXCERPT | “I don’t want to complicate your life,” was his response. But it damn well was a complication. The arrangements, the babysitters, the timing, the calls, the hair just right, the question of clothes, the confirmations, the sudden change of whim, the endless anticipation, the vacant stretch of waiting, the storm that cancelled out, the basic do without, the managing of time, the shuffling of emotions, the confusion of her feelings. Life could have been more simple. Much less complicated.

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Watermark
A Novella

The Figures, 1978

EXCERPT | I pictured him in a room full of women, approaching each one with that tender control, making us all go soft inside, as if he were passing a tray of unmentionables, exactly what we wanted to hear, that we were desirable, and being desired, we thought he was offering us something. But no, just take a good long look and eat your heart out— That’s the meal. Such sexual confusion had us huffing and puffing like mating birds in a mistaken dance…

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“The best French novel written in Oconomowoc.”

—Stephen Rodefer, poet

“What stands out is the natural flowing sound and seamless coherence of the prose, an extraordinary quality these days, and the sure grasp of experience. A fine achievement. I’m delighted.”

—Carl Rakosi, poet

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Rare, limited cloth edition available from author

Chunk Off & Float

Cold Mountain Press, 1978

This thirty-eight page collection of poems was published in 1978 by Cold Mountain Press of Austin, Texas. This limited edition of 500 copies was printed at the West Coast Print Center in Berkeley, California. Very rare.

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Proud & Ashamed

Christopher’s Books, 1978

This first major collection of poems, 128 pages, was published in an edition of 1200 copies by Melissa Albers of Christopher's Books, beautifully printed in monotype by Mackintosh & Young in Santa Barbara.

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Primagravida

Christopher’s Books, 1975

Published by Melissa Albers of Christopher’s Books, Primagravida is a 116 page collection of poems, journal entries and prose-poems about the experience of a first pregnancy and birth. Set in monotype and printed by Gary Albers in Santa Barbara.

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Nightlatch

Tribal Press, 1974

This fifty-four page book of prose-poem dream stories was written in Paris, France, published by Howard McCord of the Tribal Press, and printed in Milwaukee by The Morgan Press. Nightlatch was printed in a limited edition, now extremely rare.

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