CONTEMPLATION

Contemplation, a beautiful poetry book by award-winning author and artist August E. Allen is now available (in both hardcover and paperback)!

Through a delicate synergy of minimalist artwork and evocative prose, this collection serves as a rhythmic pause for the modern spirit. In a world that often feels overcrowded, Contemplation champions the power of the “unfilled,” acknowledging that silence is where both light and shadow reside. Each artistic expression acts as a visual meditation, stripped of clutter to reveal the profound beauty of spirit, nature and connection. It embraces both the gravity of our existence and the quiet endurance of the natural world.

Accompanying these visuals is prose that offers an honest reflection on the internal landscape, moving through its heavy, shadowed depths toward soaring arcs of connection. Contemplation provides the “sacred middle” where art and soul meet—a reminder that we do not always need to fill the void. Sometimes, we simply need to learn the art of resting within it.

Allen works primarily in watercolor, charcoal, and ink, finding that these mediums best capture the fluidity and weight of the human experience. Through Contemplation, the author offers a glimpse into a world seen through the lens of intentional stillness. Allen believes that the most important part of any piece of art is the room it leaves for the viewer to breathe.

Explore a few pages of Contemplation:

Here, throughout the pages of Contemplation, the quiet perfection of a rose meets the weight of the world, embracing both beauty and burden without hesitation.

“To traverse the trackless blue is to know
a peculiar kind of solitude—one measured
in thousand-mile spans and the rhythmic
pulse of the thermal winds. Yet, for the albatross, the vastness is never truly empty. There is a gravity that pulls more surely than the earth: the quiet, luminous presence of the other.

They are two souls tethered by a vow spoken in the language of dance and shared salt. In the stillness of the nesting grounds, the world narrows until there is only the soft brush of a wing and the steady, familiar heartbeat of a companion. It is a devotion that requires no grand gestures, only the enduring courage to return, time and again, to the one who is home.”

“The charcoal stays in the room she left
behind—the soot of a cold hearth and the
smudged fingerprints of a life that no longer
fits. She does not look back because the ink
is still wet on the chapter she just closed.
There is a specific kind of silence in this
departure; it is the sound of a woman
un-belonging herself from the dark.
Her dress carries the hue of that fragile
moment between the deepest night and
the first hint of sun. She is walking out of
the frame of her own history, stepping into
the vast, unwritten white of the page.

Honoring the dust of who she was, she walks toward the light of who she is becoming.“

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Follow this link for details or to purchase Contemplation.

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