In rural Knox County, where gravel roads cut through open prairie, writer and Knox College professor Cyn Kitchen has been paying attention — to seasons, to loss, and to faith.
After years of writing and revising, Kitchen’s new poetry collection, “Broken Hallelujah,” is coming into the world.
Kitchen lives on what she calls a slab of land at the border of trees and prairie near Maquon. It’s just her and the animals out there — four cats, two dogs, and a small flock of chickens.
Through the large plate glass windows of her house, she has watched the changing of seasons and the cycles of life.
Kitchen has lived in this rural setting — looking out those windows and walking her dogs — for 14 years.
She said the poems in “Broken Hallelujah” began taking shape after she had been out there for a while — watching, listening, and trying to translate what she saw into language.
“I started out kind of trying to capture things in photographs,” she said. “And then one day it struck me, you know, you could probably try to capture these images in language as well.”
Kitchen grew up in Galesburg, and she did not dream of becoming a writer. In fact, she did not become one until she was in her 30s.
“I had lived a life where I was a young wife raising a family, high school graduate, no real career aspirations,” she said. “And difficulties in life created a kind of selfish urge in me to do something that was just for me. And so I took a creative writing class at Carl Sandburg College and never dreamed that it would lead somewhere else and that it would spark what it did.”
Kitchen said that class unlocked the writer in her and let her “off the leash.”
She continued her education at Knox College, earning degrees in English and creative writing, then received a Master of Fine Arts from Spalding University. She began teaching at Knox in 2006 and previously published a short story collection.
But poetry, she said, was her first genre — and the one she eventually returned to after what she calls a 16-year detour.
The poems in “Broken Hallelujah” are rooted in prairie life, but they are also shaped by grief — and the changing seasons of Kitchen’s life, from her mother’s death to entering her own era of becoming a grandmother.
“I never really thought of winter as a beautiful time. Everything’s dead. There’s nothing beautiful about winter, right?” she said. “But when I got in close proximity to it, I began to see things a little bit differently. And I, at the same time, was seeing my mother in the winter of her life and being able to just pay reverence to that seemed to make good sense to me.”
The collection moves through solitude, memory and loss, while remaining attentive to what Kitchen calls small, luminous moments.
She said the title reflects that tension — praise that is imperfect and sometimes hesitant, but still offered.
“I think about the whole collection as being kind of this prayer in some way, but it’s flawed, like everything else, like everything in nature, like what lives and then what has to die,” she said. “What once is vibrant but then fades and drains and becomes brittle and lost.”
While many of the poems in “Broken Hallelujah” were previously published, Kitchen said getting the collection into the world took persistence.
She began submitting the manuscript in 2017 and racked up 90 rejections — followed by multiple revisions — before the book was accepted by Finishing Line Press.
She said she tells her students that rejection is part of the work.
“The one thing that I have figured out that separates people who get published from people who don’t get published is that people who get published never give up,” she said.
Pre-orders of “Broken Hallelujah” are available on Kitchen’s website or through the publisher’s website. The book is scheduled to be published June 19.
The creative writing professor who never dreamed of becoming a writer said poetry should have a wide audience.
“I don’t think poetry has to be reserved for a certain subset of the population.That doesn’t mean every poem is for everyone,” Kitchen said. “But I think some really important things can be said in really beautiful ways that just matter.”
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