The Mother Tree asks what it means to have a Divine Mother. Kathryn Knight Sonntag leads spiritual orphans to find Wisdom, their lost birth Mother. This remarkable book, written within the tradition of the Latter-day Saints but important for all who love the Bible, reflects on “familiar words that seem to tell a different tale.” She recovers the biblical image of the Mother as the Tree of Life: Her roots, Her trunk and Her glorious crown, and shows how “we have a Mother wound in our theology.” Written by a tree specialist and a mystical poet - The Tree at the Center, 2019 - the book shows how wisdom about the lost Mother becomes wisdom for Her children.

Margaret Barker — author of The Mother of the Lord: Volume 1: The Lady in the Temple

Sonntag has written a wise, profound, and deeply personal book. As I read, I found myself underlining page after page, as if drawing from a fountain long sought but never found. This book has both beautiful insights and well-supported scholarship. It is a book for anyone who wants to explore what it means to be embodied and approach deeper connections to an experience with the divine. The insights about our Heavenly Mother brought me closer to seeing both of my heavenly parents. Sonntag achieves this by envisioning trees and their connection to the earth as a metaphor for how sacred links, more fully considered, bind us with earth, nature, embodiment, and the heavens. And with each other. She explores our imaginative capacity and its relationship to consciousness that encourages us to ascend to higher things. I love this book. It is a gift—a vision of the feminine divine I needed.

Steven L. Peck — author of The Tragedy of King Leere, Goatherd of the la Sals

A beautiful and sensitive meditation on the Mother represented by the Tree of Life, through whom we are reminded that relationships, to flourish, are rooted in love and collaboration.

Fiona Givens — co-author of All Things New: Rethinking Sin, Salvation, and Everything in Between 

published by Faith Matters Publishing, a nonprofit publisher

Association for Mormon Letters Awards 2019 Finalist in Poetry

Deseret News Article, Association for Mormon Letters

Kathryn's visionary verse of landscapes temporal and spiritual invokes a presence deeply needed in Mormon culture--the eminent absent Mother. She reveals the sacred feminine as spiritual survival. In feminist eco-fashion she sees invisible connections between animate and inanimate, the miraculous within mundane. She accepts the challenge of Mormon theology, to translate spirit from materia, as living soul. Her images are aflame, impossible to ignore, arresting attention to awakening the self, body and soul. In the gaps between our molecules she sees electrons marry form and energy, architecture and theology. She finds "the axis of absolute reality" in every moment, by walking an inner landscape to the "cosmic odeum" in the center of our own being. Her facile grasp of poetic technique woos truth from words. Read at your own risk: you will be consumed by the alchemy catalyzed within these pages.

Maxine Hanks — editor, Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism

Sonntag's remarkable debut collection is an ode to God the Mother, "Her thousand ears, / Her thousand eyes," a deft weaving of scripture, temple symbology, ecological awareness, and lyricism. The poet rewinds creation's narrative, repositioning the Mother as the Tree at the Center, the womb, the "urtext of women," pregnant fullness and postpartum empty. She knows grief's wolf, yet remains rooted to earth and spans the heavens, "Her thousand branches adorning the long climb / into the milky stars[.]" This book is a welcome and timely contribution to the ongoing, critical work of uncovering the Mother.

Dayna Patterson — co-editor, Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry

The Tree at the Center is a beautiful debut volume of poetry that is intelligent and sincere in its look at our wilderness mother, indeed our Heavenly Mother, and the language of women. This book breaks through silence and is also full of an honest look at the speaker's own experience with motherhood. The poems speak about a voice, at this / distant opening in the sky / not of humankind, not of beast or rain, / that breaks my heart / open as Rilke's birds do ("Horizon"). In that rich language and voice found here we get to experience something both new and familiar and dear. Something that stirs and is wild. In Kathryn's words: There / is the Mother, on bended knee / in the great mind of the body, / spurring the horses on / and on and on ("Labor").

Laura Stott — author, In the Museum of Coming and Going

published by BCC Press, a nonprofit publisher

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