Emma Krosschell and her partner spent a year living in quiet isolation on a seven acre island off the Maine coast, and, during the winter months, in the mountains of Vermont. The poems in Hermitage, in which the beauty and the pain of loneliness, belonging, and selfhood interweave against the backdrop of the natural world, came out of that experience.

In Hermitage, Emma Krosschell inhabits a liminal space, somewhere between her mind and the living world of hemlock, crows, snow, wind, tides and stars. These are poems that begin in silence, and draw us into those moments when the world comes alive before her eyes. She is, above all, a witness, and we become witnesses along with her in this place where the finite, mortal self meets something greater. She is listening intently, seeing deeply, and her heart is wide open.  – Stuart Kestenbaum, Former Poet Laureate of Maine