"Everyone has the capacity
to live a happy and fulfilling life."
Mary Ricketson is an award-winning Poet, Licensed Professional Counselor, and Organic Blueberry Farmer. She believes everyone can live a happy and fulfilling life and uniquely combines her talent as a psychotherapist with her art as a poet to engage with people on a helpful level. Inspired by nature and her role as a mental health counselor, her poems reflect the healing powers of nature, a path she follows from Appalachian tradition, with the surrounding mountains as a midwife for her words.
New Poetry Releases
Tall Flowers and Living Long
I selected poems from my long collection, intrigued by my own details of my kinship with dogs, mules, birds, rabbits, mountains, creeks, trees, and every living plant. When I began choosing poems, I was curious to discover if I even have a book here. As it came together, I was excited to find it’s a story of how I do my life, the good things, innocent things, and the hard things, things you never quite overcome. These poems include new life, long life, and grief, the natural way of things.
"I try to green and grow like this field, natural. Hope says, I’ll spring up when sunshine and weather say it’s time. Neighbor fields grow on their own.
Why not me?"
'Trouble'
“I want my words to pop-out pretty like daffodils, full of grace, unique petals and colors. If only my words could be a work of art in a big bunch like these flowers. If words could
flow in rhythm, one after another.”
'Trouble'
'Stutters' Received Notable Praise in the North Carolina Literary Review
Words Worth Hearing
a review by Julia Nunnally Duncan
"So, as I read Ricketson’s poetic account of her lifelong struggle to understand and overcome stuttering, I vicariously experienced this struggle with her…. “I hope my life is like that crocus, one of a kind,/to hear and accept, however I speak and bloom,/purpose and function profound, far from perfection.” She attempts to see her own uniqueness, like that of the crocus, as valuable […] I think Ricketson has accomplished her goal in Stutters, it is a book of hope, a stirring and enlightening book of hope."