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
