Lisa Cottrell gives us two gifts in one book. Life As I’ve Known It is a book of poetry and photography that is a love letter to life. Poems profound, resonant and inspiring are complemented by serene, majestic and intimate photographs. Life As I’ve Known It portrays a life lived deeply: love, loss, grief, intimacy, family, nature, and an open-hearted oneness with the moment. Pulitzer Prize winning poet Galway Kinnell praised Lisa Cottrell’s poem “The Cave,” calling it archetypical, biblical and mythical.

Informed by feminism, queer love, environmentalism, and the practice of loving mindfulness, the subjects cover a wide range from grief at the loss of her mother as an infant, Grandma’s dinner table in Kentucky, new love celebrated in the Georgia mountains, to poems that call us to be fully in the present. The photographs are a perfect complement to the poetry.