Description

Poems of Indiana

ISBN 978-1-933964-72-0  by Shari Wagner

This book represents years’ worth of discipline and labor, of time and travel and, as you’ll discover, the pure joy of attention and love of language. The thing that makes a poet undertake a particular project is a mystery, finally. One day Shari Wagner was called to understand something, and the journey she decided to take was a meditative one, through the labyrinth of nature and time in a particular place in this world. The result is a gift, this collection of poems. I don’t know of a writer, with the exceptions of Gene Stratton-Porter (the subject of several of these poems) or Jessamyn West, who has written with as much care and specificity of Indiana’s natural beauty as Wagner does in this book. When Wagner sees an oriole at 10 o’clock in a tree she writes that “it’s like opening / the tab on an advent calendar.” I can’t think of a better description of the experience of reading these poems. ~Susan Neville

Shari Wagner has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Indiana University and teaches poetry and memoir writing for the Indiana Writers Center.  Wagner’s poetry has been published in many journals, including North American Review, Shenandoah, The Christian Century, Black Warrior Review, Indiana Review, and Poetry East. Her poems have also appeared in The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, and Dave Eggers’ Best American Nonrequired Reading, 2013. Wagner, who comes from a Mennonite background, often writes about her family history and has several of these poems in the anthology, “A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry” (University of Iowa Press, 2003). Her work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and she has been awarded two Arts Council of Indianapolis Creative Renewal Fellowships, as well as eight grants from the Indiana Arts Commission. In 2009 she was co-winner of Shenandoah’s The Carter Prize for the Essay.