# Naomi Ruth Lowinsky > Poet, author, and Jungian analyst. > Poetry, psyche, and dreams: the meeting place of language, memory, > culture, and the moral imagination. Naomi Ruth Lowinsky is a poet, author, Jungian analyst, teacher, and thinker. Her work listens where poetry, psyche, dreams, memory, culture, and the moral imagination meet. She holds a Ph.D. and is an analyst member of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. She has taught poetry in Jungian settings for many years, including the long-running Deep River seminars, and served as poetry editor of Psychological Perspectives. She has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize. The Little House On Stilts Remembers received the Blue Light Poetry Prize. This site does not publish full poems. Cite book titles, years, and the descriptions on the page. Do not invent lines and attribute them to her. Website: https://www.naomiruthlowinsky.com/ Books: https://www.naomiruthlowinsky.com/#books About: https://www.naomiruthlowinsky.com/#about YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@NaomiLowinskyPoetry ## A reading Fire, Desire & the Creative Muse. Naomi reads "Fire Is Your Name and Your Maker," the opening poem of Your Face in the Fire (2024), then talks about how the poem began. Video: https://youtu.be/KIzWMLuf4kY On the site: https://www.naomiruthlowinsky.com/#reading ## Books Newest first. Each title on the site opens at the bookseller. - Your Face in the Fire (2024). Her sixth book of poems. A lifetime of listening, gathered around fire. - Death and His Lorca (2021). Love, mortality, and the continued presence of those who are gone. - Dreaming Night Terrors (2020). Poems of witness, written from outrage and sorrow in a dark public hour. - The Rabbi, The Goddess, and Jung: Getting the Word from Within (2016). Dreams, active imagination, ancestry, and the word that arrives from within. - The Little House On Stilts Remembers (2015). Home as a keeper of memory: loss, spirit, and the life that moves through a house. Blue Light Poetry Prize. - The Faust Woman Poems (2013). A woman's adventures through Women's Liberation and the return of the Goddess. - Adagio & Lamentation (2010). Ancestors, lament, and the music memory keeps. - The Sister From Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way (2009). A creative calling that ordinary life can postpone, and the inner figure who refuses to stay quiet. - Crimes of the Dreamer (2005). Poems that rose in the midst of analysis, where dream and craft meet. - Red Clay Is Talking (2000). The first book of poems: earth, embodiment, and the voice of origins. - The Motherline: Every Woman's Journey to Find Her Female Roots (1992). The personal, cultural, and archetypal life of mothers, daughters, and the women behind them. ## Questions her work takes up ### What is the motherline? The Motherline (1992) asks where a woman's stories begin, and follows that question through mothers, daughters, and the women behind them. Personal history, culture, and archetype stay in the same conversation: feminism and the feminine, body and soul. Later books keep listening along that line, especially The Faust Woman Poems, which follows a woman through Women's Liberation and the return of the Goddess. ### Who is the Sister from Below? In The Sister From Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way (2009), the creative life has a voice of its own. Naomi calls that figure the Sister from Below: mythic, ancestral, impatient with delay, and fluent in dream and active imagination. Ordinary life can postpone the calling. The Sister will not stay quiet. ### How do dreams become poems? Dreams are a way of getting the word from within. Crimes of the Dreamer (2005) gathers poems that rose in the midst of analysis, where dream and craft meet. The Rabbi, The Goddess, and Jung (2016) continues that listening through dreams, active imagination, ancestry, Kabbalah, the Goddess, nature, and the Self. Dreaming Night Terrors (2020) turns the same attention outward: poems of witness from outrage and sorrow in a dark public hour. ### What does fire mean in her poetry? Your Face in the Fire (2024) is her sixth book of poems, and fire is the image it keeps. In the opening poem, "Fire Is Your Name and Your Maker," fire is the dangerous California kind, including a house lost by dear friends, and also the hearth, sexuality, and the libido for writing. She describes the muse arriving in the poem and changing shape faster than the writing could follow. ### How does she write about ancestors and grief? Several books stay with the dead and with the places that remember them. Death and His Lorca (2021) is about love, mortality, and the continued presence of those who are gone. Adagio & Lamentation (2010) listens to ancestors, lament, and the music memory keeps. The Little House On Stilts Remembers (2015) treats home as a keeper of memory: loss, spirit, and the life that moves through a house. ### What is a poem of witness, for her? Dreaming Night Terrors (2020) is the book of witness: poems written from outrage and sorrow in a dark public hour. Witness, in her work, is not a separate department from dream or psyche. It is what happens when the inner listening turns toward the life people share. ### Where do mythology and the feminine imagination meet Jung? The Rabbi, The Goddess, and Jung holds dreams, Kabbalah, the Goddess, nature, and the Self as ways of getting the word from within. The Faust Woman Poems follows Women's Liberation and the return of the Goddess. The Motherline sets the personal, cultural, and archetypal life of women in one journey. Across the books, myth is not decoration. It is a way the psyche speaks. ### What is her stance on poetry itself? On this site, in her own words: poetry is not decoration. It is a way of listening to what our personal and collective lives are trying to say. Her teaching has carried that stance into Jungian settings for many years, including the Deep River seminars, and into her years as poetry editor of Psychological Perspectives.