BOOKS
One Needful Song
Catamaran Press, 2024
"One Needful Song casts spells of transformation: the tongues of songbirds turned out in delicate and sweet spice, the hearth of the home becoming the heart of the home, the roof of scorched Notre Dame healing beneath its tarp. There is such a sense of hope and renewal in these ecopoetic elegies in which bees, blossom and bird are restored, family and strangers alike are redeemed, and though there are storms there is also a dream of outlasting it. This book is a kind of miracle."
— D. A. Powell, author of Chronic & winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
"This is a rare creation of song and scar, of vulnerability and both emotional and structural complexity. In Jeanne Wagner’s new collection One Needful Song, the outer and inner, conceptual and human worlds mingle in accessible yet complex ways. Brimming with meditations on history and myth, family and nostalgia, landscape and personal identity, these vibrant poems remain grounded in a universal familiarity that opens us up to something greater. If one of the aims of poetry is to condense our vast, contradictory, and beautifully human world into the briefest of songs, One Needful Song, being both intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging, stands as a testament to its possibility."
— John Sibley Williams, author of The Drowning House
"One Needful Song casts memory and imagination as dream—a mother lifting an ironed shirt “warm as a new laid egg”—and plumbs the astonishing . . . a pregnant woman covering her belly with bees. Here is celebration and lament in equal measure. These poems/songs—deeply needed by us all—call to mind how the Romans supposedly “cut out the tongues of the larks, coated them with honey and spice, devoured them like edible songs.” This collection, too, will be devoured."
— Doug Ramspeck, author of Blur
Catamaran Press, 2024
"One Needful Song casts spells of transformation: the tongues of songbirds turned out in delicate and sweet spice, the hearth of the home becoming the heart of the home, the roof of scorched Notre Dame healing beneath its tarp. There is such a sense of hope and renewal in these ecopoetic elegies in which bees, blossom and bird are restored, family and strangers alike are redeemed, and though there are storms there is also a dream of outlasting it. This book is a kind of miracle."
— D. A. Powell, author of Chronic & winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
"This is a rare creation of song and scar, of vulnerability and both emotional and structural complexity. In Jeanne Wagner’s new collection One Needful Song, the outer and inner, conceptual and human worlds mingle in accessible yet complex ways. Brimming with meditations on history and myth, family and nostalgia, landscape and personal identity, these vibrant poems remain grounded in a universal familiarity that opens us up to something greater. If one of the aims of poetry is to condense our vast, contradictory, and beautifully human world into the briefest of songs, One Needful Song, being both intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging, stands as a testament to its possibility."
— John Sibley Williams, author of The Drowning House
"One Needful Song casts memory and imagination as dream—a mother lifting an ironed shirt “warm as a new laid egg”—and plumbs the astonishing . . . a pregnant woman covering her belly with bees. Here is celebration and lament in equal measure. These poems/songs—deeply needed by us all—call to mind how the Romans supposedly “cut out the tongues of the larks, coated them with honey and spice, devoured them like edible songs.” This collection, too, will be devoured."
— Doug Ramspeck, author of Blur
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Everything Turns Into Something Else
Grayson Books, 2019
"These are poems about desire, about the intricate complications of family; and these are poems that move easily between the personal and the larger issues of human life. full of wonderful metaphorical transformations, of one thing turning into something else, Everything Turns Into Something Else is a highly crafted and well organized book of poems in which the poems form a whole that is greater than its parts."
— Robert Cording, author of Finding the World's Fullness: On Poetry, Metaphor, and Mystery
"Here is a vivid, arresting, questioning book, a book that investigates both the visible textures of daily life and “the holiness of hidden things.” In poem after poem, Jeanne Wagner brings extraordinary intelligence and electric language to subjects ranging from ocularists to aeroponics, Demeter to Descartes, a meditation on Oppenheimer’s house to a defense of Goldilocks. It’s a great pleasure to see such a lively mind so fully engaged. Everything Turns Into Something Else is full of wonders.”
—John Brehm, author of No Day at the Beach
"Whether her titles are exotic like "Turning a Sentence Dark" or "Epistemology of the Fall," or somewhat familiar like "The Angels" or "Going for the Jugular," Jeanne Wagner brings an originality to whatever she chooses to take on. I love, in particular, how she thinks her way down a page, every line seemingly discovered by the line that preceded it. A wonderful achievement."
—Stephen Dunn, Pulitzer Prize winner, author of Pagan Virtues
Grayson Books, 2019
"These are poems about desire, about the intricate complications of family; and these are poems that move easily between the personal and the larger issues of human life. full of wonderful metaphorical transformations, of one thing turning into something else, Everything Turns Into Something Else is a highly crafted and well organized book of poems in which the poems form a whole that is greater than its parts."
— Robert Cording, author of Finding the World's Fullness: On Poetry, Metaphor, and Mystery
"Here is a vivid, arresting, questioning book, a book that investigates both the visible textures of daily life and “the holiness of hidden things.” In poem after poem, Jeanne Wagner brings extraordinary intelligence and electric language to subjects ranging from ocularists to aeroponics, Demeter to Descartes, a meditation on Oppenheimer’s house to a defense of Goldilocks. It’s a great pleasure to see such a lively mind so fully engaged. Everything Turns Into Something Else is full of wonders.”
—John Brehm, author of No Day at the Beach
"Whether her titles are exotic like "Turning a Sentence Dark" or "Epistemology of the Fall," or somewhat familiar like "The Angels" or "Going for the Jugular," Jeanne Wagner brings an originality to whatever she chooses to take on. I love, in particular, how she thinks her way down a page, every line seemingly discovered by the line that preceded it. A wonderful achievement."
—Stephen Dunn, Pulitzer Prize winner, author of Pagan Virtues
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In the Body of our Lives
Sixteen Rivers Press, 2011
“Jeanne Wagner’s poetry rides through a landscape both familiar in its humanity and astonishingly new. Her fluid syntax and inventive diction flood into hidden and unexpected fissures of experience and memory. She seems to carve out new spaces where images pour into and out of one another and where metaphors appear like undiscovered species, strange yet perfectly adapted to her world. Her imagination ranges from the cellular level to the cosmic reaches and from the Arctic to the Flamingo Motel of Berkeley. She activates the nuances of language itself, its near-lost etymologies and inherent double entendres, to explore the dark complications of home and relationship, grief, emotional deafness, the estranging skin, sin, and redemption. These poems move and amaze and consistently enlighten.”
—Jeanne Emmons
Sixteen Rivers Press, 2011
“Jeanne Wagner’s poetry rides through a landscape both familiar in its humanity and astonishingly new. Her fluid syntax and inventive diction flood into hidden and unexpected fissures of experience and memory. She seems to carve out new spaces where images pour into and out of one another and where metaphors appear like undiscovered species, strange yet perfectly adapted to her world. Her imagination ranges from the cellular level to the cosmic reaches and from the Arctic to the Flamingo Motel of Berkeley. She activates the nuances of language itself, its near-lost etymologies and inherent double entendres, to explore the dark complications of home and relationship, grief, emotional deafness, the estranging skin, sin, and redemption. These poems move and amaze and consistently enlighten.”
—Jeanne Emmons
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The Zen Piano-Mover
Rochester Hills, MI: NFSPS Press, 2004
In her poetry Jeanne Wagner explores universal questions about spaces and connections in human relationships. She reminds her readers of demands made upon us despite "how frail the body's wiring is." Mary Jo Firth Gillett calls this book "a collection to savor."
$5.00 plus postage if ordered from Polly Opsahl.
Rochester Hills, MI: NFSPS Press, 2004
In her poetry Jeanne Wagner explores universal questions about spaces and connections in human relationships. She reminds her readers of demands made upon us despite "how frail the body's wiring is." Mary Jo Firth Gillett calls this book "a collection to savor."
$5.00 plus postage if ordered from Polly Opsahl.