Chiaroscuro

“Ever since Kimberly Beck was a student of mine at Whitworth University, I have known that she is an unusual and gifted observer of life, seen in the light of her deep and authentic faith. This collection of poetic artwork provides beautiful and powerful evidence of that fact.”

Bruce Gore

“Who doesn’t pause, if even for a moment, to gaze at some wonder: an older couple, in their nineties, walking hand in hand under a canopy of autumn colors. Even busy and hurried people still pause because they cherish beauty. But some people do more. They not only gaze at beauty; they create it, in the stroke of a brush or the pluck of a string. Kimberly Beck does it with words. Her Chiaroscuro is like reading beauty. The book is divided into four sections: Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring. She visits and revisits the familiar world she—and we—know. She sees wonder in it: a horse’s breath on a cold day, the silent drift of a leaf falling to the ground, a heron standing as a sentinel on the shores of a lake. She has the rare gift of seeing beauty, feeling wonder, reflecting deeply on life itself, and finding just the right words to create beauty from it. I kept smiling as I read this lovely book. It awakened a longing for beauty, too. Thank you, Kimberly, for this gift.”

Gerald L. Sittser