Selected Poems of Kytka Hilmar

Kytka Hilmar has spent decades following the quiet roads of New Mexico, where stories drift like dust and the past leans close enough to touch. Alone but never lonely, she has crossed canyons, slept beneath restless skies, walked riverbanks that remember everything, and stood beneath sunlit adobe walls that still hold the weight of prayers.In this collection, the land does not sit silent. It speaks through the wind's sharp edge, through rivers that carve deep into memory, through forgotten towns and hidden places where the ghosts of history linger just beneath the surface. Every line is shaped by the road, every word a tribute to the raw beauty of New Mexico a place where solitude becomes a kind of prayer, and the horizon is never an end but an invitation.The Soul of New Mexico is not a book of destinations, but a map of belonging. These poems carry the rhythm of the desert, the hush of canyon shadows, the rough honesty of old trails, and the quiet lessons of time and wind. They invite you to listen, not just to the land, but to yourself to the places inside you that feel most alive when you are far from anywhere, and closer than ever to home.

Kytka Hilmar is a traveler and writer drawn to the dust-covered trails where stories outlive the men who rode them. From ghost towns to outlaw hideouts, from weathered saloons to quiet desert passes, she carries the legends of the West not as history, but as living companions alive in every mile of her journey across the wide, untamed American frontier.These poems are not souvenirs. They are the breath of the frontier itself: the echo of spurred boots on creaking floorboards, the hush of high plains wind moving through canyon walls, the restless song of cowboys and the shadows of outlaws who still ride in memory. They are the quiet conversations between the bones of old towns and the heartbeats of those who still believe in the wild.Through backroads and borderlands, in the shadows of old rail lines and the shimmer of distant horizons, Kytka has learned that the Wild West was never truly tamed it simply waits for those who know how to listen.Cowboys and Outlaws is not a map of the past, but a tribute to the spirit that refuses to fade. Each poem is a raised glass to the legends and the landscapes alike, to the ghosts and the gunslingers, to the sunburned drifters and singing cowboys. It is a hymn to the wide freedom that still stirs in the dust, and a quiet vow: the West still lives, and so do we, every time we dare to follow its trail.

Kytka Hilmar has traversed thousands of miles alone on the road, crossing deserts, mountains, canyons, valleys, and all beneath an endless sky. These poems are not memories of the journey they are the journey.Yet Brushstrokes of God stands apart from her other collections. Where her words usually run wild and untethered, here they find their rhythm in form: steady quatrains, four-line stanzas shaped like the quiet cadence of footsteps across open ground. There is a deliberateness to this style, a heartbeat within each rhyme, as if the landscapes themselves asked to be spoken this way.Each piece carries the breath of the places she has witnessed: plains that stretch beyond sight, wild rivers that carve the earth, forests that breathe in quiet shadows, prairies that ripple with wind, cliffs that hold the horizon, and sunlit paths where dust rises like smoke. Through storms and stillness, fire-scarred ground and waters that refuse to be tamed, her words cradle the wild places where solitude becomes a prayer.Brushstrokes of God is a tribute to the raw beauty of the earth a map not drawn on paper, but lived in wind and dust, carved by time, and touched by the divine. These poems invite you to travel not just across the land, but deeper into the silence where ancestors walked, where the natural world speaks, and where the presence of God is written in every stone.