What Enters Through the Open Heart: Poems

Author: Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE

Publisher:
Monkfish Book Publishing

Publication date:
October 20, 2026

ISBN-13:
978-1966608554

Description

What Enters through the Open Heart is a collection of poems about what feels fragile, fleeting, and ephemeral in life. Both a poet and a spirituality author with a worldwide reputation, Paintner writes about her experience of chronic illness, grief, loss, nature’s consolation, and she brings to life some of the saints who had kinship with creatures and experienced illness as well. Ultimately, it is a collection about what it means to live with an open heart in the midst of pain and vulnerability.

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Praise for the Book

Christine Paintner’s newest collection, What Enters Through the Open Heart, is a book of deep listening—to the aching body, the sorrowing heart, the breathing earth, and the luminous hum of the sacred threaded through the daily ordinary. These poems turn illness into altar, grief into teacher, and attention itself into prayer, offering a fierce, tender theology of presence. With a voice both intimate and spacious, the collection moves effortlessly between hospital rooms and forests, saints and seaweed, ancestral memory and vanishing species, reminding us that “grief is the harsh light at midday,” and by learning to stand inside this light, these poems, we are illumined. This is poetry that does not look away: this is poetry that kneels, blesses, and keeps vigil. What Enters Through the Open Heart, leaves the reader altered—exquisitely —more porous, more awake, and ever more deeply in love with this fragile, astonishing world.

Judyth Hill

Author of nine poetry collections including Writing Down the Moon

What is it about the mysterious alchemy of pain mixed with faith that, if embraced—however reluctantly—often produces profound beauty? It's a question worth asking Paintner because, in What Enters Through the Open Heart, she has achieved it. Excavating a topic which might easily pull usdown, she instead gives us wings. Through these poems, readers are shown how one might use an intimacy with pain as portal to deeper intimacy with God. Chronic illness is unasked for, but it does not come empty-handed. The forced stillness that comes with it has knit this poet into nature, making her sister to birds, bees, dragonflies, and the stones "who sing of endurance." She learns a new way to see and surrender, teaching us that we can, too. Chronically ill or not, our strength will inevitably diminish as the years gnaw away our youth. For these reasons and more, this book, my friends, is what is called a gift.

Nikki Grimes

New York Times bestselling author of Ordinary Hazards, a memoir in verse, and Glory, Too.

What Enters Through the Open Heart is an astonishing new poetry collection by Christine Valters Paintner. Its exquisite, intimate, and courageous poems make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, creating a portal into the communal, liminal vulnerability we routinely call “life.” Deeply tender, its poems embody loss, name grief, feel pain, and embrace joy’s mystery in everyday blessings. This amma’s awe-drawn word gifts resurrection—as real, healing, and unbelievable as the sun’s first rays at dawn.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher

Poet and translator of Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence and The Cloud of Unknowing

With gentle care and occasional astonishing insight, Christine Valters Paintner's poems offer consolation, kindness, hope and love. As I read each one, I was led to stop, to await each poem's message and truth. In this new collection, Christine once again gives "beauty back to God," as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote. The collection offers an immersion in the beauty of love that will not let us go.

Mary C. Earle

Author of Did You Sing Your Song? and The Desert Mothers

Christine Valters Paintner’s What Enters Through the Open Heart is “one long unfolding prayer” of wise, courageous poems for anyone seeking sanctuary from grief and pain. Paintner, who suffers from degenerative autoimmune illness, learns from and celebrates both the natural world and the lives of the saints, accessing “a doorway [that] opens into another way of being.”