Connie Wanek

Celebrated poets Ted Kooser along with Connie Wanek, and illustrator Richard Jones, explore figures of speech in a spirited and magical way--and invite our imaginations out to play. A freewheeling romp through the world of imagery and metaphor, this quietly startling collection of thirty poems, framed by the four elements, is about art and reality, fact and fancy. Look around: what do you see? A clown balancing a pie in a tree, or an empty nest perched on a leafless branch? As poet Connie Wanek alludes to in her afterword--a lively dialogue with former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser--sometimes the simplest sights and sounds "summon our imaginations" and cry out to be clothed in the alchemical language of poetry. This compendium of the fleeting and unexpected turns the everyday--turtles, trees, and tadpoles; cow pies, lazy afternoons, and pillowy white marshmallows--into poetic gold. A brilliant and timeless collaboration that evokes both the mystery and grandeur of the natural world and the cozy, mundane moments of daily life, this exquisitely illustrated collection is the go-to gift book of the season for poetry fans of all ages.

Inventive, surprising, moving, and often funny, the twenty poems in this book portray a female deity (Mrs. God herself) and follow her and her well-known spouse as they navigate creation and the following millennia. The following are a few lines from the first poem: "Someone had to do the dirty work, spading the garden, moving mountains, keeping the darkness out of the light, and she took every imperfection personally. Mr. Big Ideas, sure, but someone had to run the numbers..."

For decades a restorer of old homes, Connie Wanek shows us that poetry is everywhere, encountered as easily in the waterways, landscapes, and winters of Minnesota, as in the old roofs and darkened drawers of a home long uninhabited. Rival Gardens includes more than thirty unpublished poems, along with poems selected from three previous books-all in Wanek’s unmistakable voice: plainspoken and elegant, unassuming and wise, observant and original. Many of her new poems focus on the garden, beginning with the Garden of Eden. A deep feeling for family and for the losses and gains of growing into maturity mark the tone of Rival Gardens, with Wanek always attending to the telling detail and the natural world.

"Connie Wanek . . . is superb, mature and] a master of mood and language."--St. Paul Pioneer Press"No poet I know, with the exception of Jane Kenyon, is as able to discover the magic and depth in ordinary, day-to-day life and to artfully render that vision for the reader."--Louis JenkinsConnie Wanek's third book of poems, On Speaking Terms, is amusing, tender, and surprising. Herself a librarian in Duluth, Minnesota, Wanek's poems emerge from everyday objects--Scrabble, garlic, lipstick, hawkweed--and the landscapes, waterscapes, and severe winters of the upper Midwest. Readers will shove off in canoes, buckle on skis, set fishing nets in Lake Superior, and spend time in the real world of the imagination. Lit by startling metaphors, Wanek's work has been justly compared to Wislawa Szymborska's for its wry wit and spare "Eastern European" sensibility.. . . Afterwards it was Eve who madethe first snowman, her second sin, and she laughedas she rolled up the wet white carpetand lifted the wee head into place." And God causeth the sun to melt her labors, for He was a jealous God." Connie Wanek is the author of two books of poems. She lives in Duluth, Minnesota, where she is a public librarian and renovates old houses with her husband. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including The Atlantic Monthly and Poetry. In 2006 she was named a Witter Bynner Fellow in Poetry from the Library of Congress.