Alchemy of Headwinds

The cover

This collection is John Macker's most urgent and unflinching collection to date. An elegiac roadmap scrawled on the wind, birdsong, and desert dust. In a voice shaped by over fifty years of poetic resistance and reverence, John chronicles five years of American unraveling with raw honesty and spiritual grit.

From the haunted stillness of pandemic solitude to the thunder of memory echoing across the mesas. In this work Macker writes elegies for friends, fellow writers, and endangered landscapes that have shaped his life. Alchemy of Headwinds is a literary reckoning it is both lament and a survival ritual.

These are poems that carry you across borders, down forgotten roads, and into the liminal light between dusk and truth. Rooted in the desert Southwest and reaching toward the universal, Macker's voice is that of a witness, a dissenter, a naturalist with dirty boots and a burning candle in his hands.

Tune back in every Tuesday and Thursday to hear John read selected poems from Alchemy of Headwinds. As poetry is a medium that is best enjoyed when read aloud, for it is song at its root and these little books serve as mere placeholders.

Coming soon