In her new poetry collection, Armed to the Teeth, Ellen Hirning Schmidt faces life’s perils courageously, and being armed with the powers of family, the natural world, and a strong heart full of love, emerges victorious. Readers of this book will take heart from its victories. The poet says this about the focus of her book: “I created the poems in this collection to explore despair versus hope as experienced through personal memory, beyond into generational patterns, and in response to climate change and the social divides of our larger world. Nature and humor provided abundant metaphors for this exploration, as is evident in the cover photo, ‘Stones in Conversation’.”