Once I was a stone

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Trade Paperback. 6 x 9. 130pp.

Once I was a stone is an intimate portrait of gender nonconformity rooted in the context of childhood and the natural world. With an honest and hopeful tone, Emilie Lygren grapples with the complexities of selfhood, power, and loss, offering insight on our intricate relationship with Earth’s ecosystems.

Early Reviews

“Emilie Lygren’s poems are pulse and heartbeat! Their clear vision restores our own bigger sight. Remember when we felt connected to everything? Emilie’s poems are gravity, immediate ground, wide horizon, ashes pitched off a cliff, creek stones carried up a mountain. I love their endearing truthfulness, beauty and lack of fear!”

–Naomi Shihab Nye

“Through their deft and deceptive simplicity, Emilie Lygren’s poems gently urge us toward our own becoming, our own difficult transformations. As she writes in the opening poem, “Sometimes I forget/sand had to break/to become so soft.” Whether meditating on the fluid nature of gender, or suggesting that, like caterpillars, we too are born with “imaginal cells” that know how to step into a new self, the poems in Once I Was a Stone invite us into a deeper reckoning with both childhood and identity. Above all, this luminous and masterful new collection ushers us into a world where we can all feel safe and welcome, no matter who we are, or how far we’ve come on our journey. It is hard to put into words just how essential this book feels, or to say how many lives might be saved simply because Emilie chose to share her story with such openness, honesty, and grace.”

—James Crews, author of Unlocking the Heart and Turning Toward Grief

“These poems imagine what it is to be river, creek, stone, cottonwood. To be in love with “branches, barnacles, and acorns.” Many will find shelter here in Lygren’s moving and personal meditation on being, “a body among bodies” in the natural world.”

—Danusha Laméris

Emilie Lygren sings in the poetic ancestral lineage of Mary Oliver, attuned to the natural world and its intricate wonders while expanding the forest chorus into the fluid undulations of being ungendered. Their poems weave reflections through cottonwoods and alder leaf, poppies and mycelium, the spider’s intricate webbing, the stone breaking itself smooth and speaking as sand. This collection builds a world against the binary, and bends poems like a willow toward the interconnectedness of all.”

– Kai Coggin, author of Mother of Other Kingdoms

In “Once I Was A Stone,” Emilie Lygren explores the beautiful and painful process of expanding the spaces between boundaries — and, how the construct of said boundaries forces the liminal body to invent new language in order to understand itself. Through images that overlay the body onto landscape, Lygren asks us to question the borders between body and nature, and body and history. “Not between as in the middle, / or going from one place to another / but between as its own country,” Lygren writes. At once a tale of survival and a celebration of a life inside ever-expanding margins, this collection illuminates the uncontainable nature of a self that defies easy translation.

– Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

Emilie Lygren’s timely collection catalogues intersections between identity and place, ecological awareness and grief, beauty and meaning making. Grounded in curiosity and reverence, Lygren takes the reader on a journey through landscapes both human and more than human—where the dignity of every organism, from spider to sparrow, is celebrated. Calling on her experience as an outdoor science educator, the poet offers a gentle but unflinching look at what it means to be in relationship with place.