Customer Reviews

Lo & Behold

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"Praise be to gravity for these taut strings," a poem by Shanna Powlus Wheeler's first collection enjoins, but let me also praise her own taut lines--for their craft as well as their quirky delight in everything immediate, shining, and alive. Could this be a lost daughter of Gerard Manley Hopkins, turned up along the Susquehanna? Praise this new voice and her vision, too, which finds joy in so much without ever denying gravity's tug. Poetry compelled by wonder and gratitude is rare enough, but listen: these poems also brightly sing!

~Blurb by Julia Spicher Kasdorf, author of "Sleeping Preacher"

The quiet, precise language and the careful, yet intricate construction of the poems in this chapbook echo the words of its title, "Lo & Behold," for they announce the arrival of a new, compelling voice in contemporary poetry. I am already looking forward to the first full-length collection by Shanna Powlus Wheeler.

~Blurb by Gary Fincke, author of "The Fire Landscape"

Shanna Powlus Wheeler is a celebratory poet, one who enjoys the world -- its miracles, its daily wonders. While she is, at heart, a nature poet, she is also a poet of small things: a water chestnut and a dung beetle, a crow and a wind chime. This combination makes her poetry both an invitation and a pleasure. At the end of "Bur Song" she offers praise to this "subtle hitchhiker / brute spiny wonder." It is the surprise -- and rightness -- of images such as these that makes Wheeler's work so delightful to read.

~Blurb by Kim Bridgford, Editor of "Mezzo Cammin"