WELCOME CENTER

In Welcome Center, Justin Den Herder crafts a luminous, compassionate poetic landscape where the spiritual intersects with the everyday, and wonder is not a rarity but a practice. These poems gather readers at the brink of mystery and memory. They tease out the transformative potential of presence.

Structured in five parts, the book is arranged like a hike through strata of human experience from the natural to the divine. It posits that welcome is a fundamental and defining characteristic of being human.

These poems believe in the power of attention and mercy. In a world obsessed with motion and achievement, Welcome Center makes a radical gesture; it asks us to center ourselves by pausing and witnessing.

‘Maybe appreciation is our purest action’