Poet and editor James Crews has published The Sacred Everyday: Poems of Peace & Stillness, a new collection released on October 27, 2026, by Andrews McMeel Publishing. The 144-page book brings together 98 new poems and ten reflective pauses designed to encourage journaling, meditation and closer attention to ordinary experience.
The collection centers on moments that are easy to overlook: encounters with the natural world, relationships and the small details of daily routines. Crews uses poetry to invite a slower pace of observation, making stillness a subject for reading rather than a formal practice that must be performed in a particular way.
The ten reflective pauses give the book an additional practical dimension. Instead of leaving every response to the reader’s interpretation of a poem, these sections provide opportunities to stop, write and consider personal experience. That structure allows the collection to be read straight through or opened occasionally for a shorter period of reflection.
The Sacred Everyday belongs to a strand of personal-growth literature that uses creative writing rather than step-by-step instruction. Its poems do not constitute a clinical intervention or a prescribed meditation course. They provide language and imagery through which readers can examine familiar experiences, especially those involving gratitude, attention and connection.
Crews has edited several poetry anthologies concerned with kindness and the everyday, including The Wonder of Small Things, The Path to Kindness and How to Love the World. He has also written the essay collection Kindness Will Save the World and four prize-winning poetry collections. His broader work has consistently treated poetry as something readers can bring into ordinary life.
The new collection extends that interest while giving more space to the act of pausing. A person might encounter a poem during a busy day and return to a particular image later, or use one of the prompts as the beginning of a journal entry. These are possible ways of engaging with the book, not outcomes the reader is promised to experience.
Crews also leads an online writing community called The Monthly Pause. That work offers additional context for his interest in reflection as a shared practice, although The Sacred Everyday stands on its own as a published poetry collection rather than a membership program or guided workshop.
Andrews McMeel has released the title in hardcover, ebook and audio formats dated October 27. The different editions make the collection available for reading or listening, while the printed reflective sections can be used alongside a personal notebook. For mindfulness-minded readers who prefer literature to instructional exercises, the new book offers a distinct format for spending time with stillness and attention.
Source: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Web: https://publishing.andrewsmcmeel.com/book/the-sacred-everyday-poems-of-peace-stillness/
