This book you're holding 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

About the Author

Shari Miller Wagner was born in Goshen, Indiana and grew up near Markle, along the Wabash River. Her father worked as a family physician and her mother as the editor of The Markle Times. When Wagner was thirteen, her family spent a year in Somalia, in the village of Jamama. After majoring in English at Goshen College, Wagner worked in Louisiana as a Mennonite volunteer for the Clifton-Choctaw, researching their history and tutoring the school children. At Indiana University she earned her MFA degree and met her husband, Chuck Wagner. They taught two years at Western Carolina University and then returned to Indiana, teaching at Franklin College and Butler University. She has taught creative writing in elementary schools, community centers, libraries and nursing homes. She has been an instructor with the Indiana Writers Center for the last six years, teaching workshops in poetry and memoir. She and her husband and two daughters, Vienna and Iona, live north of Indianapolis in Westfield. Her first book or poetry was Evening Chore (Cascadia 2008). She provides the photographs for this new book.

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