The New Life is a braided collection of poems that explores motherhood through the lens of a fractured childhood and intergenerational loss and trauma. Moving through the intense years of early motherhood, the speaker’s childhood memories and fears muscle their way into her consciousness. Stories of loss return throughout the book: a grandmother’s stillbirth, a child lost on the boat from Russia to the U.S., friends’ miscarriages and child losses. There are poems written in the wake of 9/11 and Sandy Hook. Throughout the manuscript, we see the speaker wrestling with the turmoil of raising children in a volatile, violent world.
"The capacious, tender poems of Wendy Wisner's The New Life range from the peach fuzz on a new baby's head and the leaky, weepy days of early motherhood to midlife, postpartum sex, and the legacy of intergenerational trauma. "It's dangerous // to be a baby, a child / in this world," Wisner reminds us--but these wise, well-crafted poems insist on the wonder and treasure of raising children, too."
—Nancy Reddy, author of Pocket Universe and co-editor of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood
"Wendy Wisner’s newest book of poetry, The New Life, reminds us—frankly—that children can die: “It’s dangerous // to be a baby, a child / in this world,” the poem “After Newtown” says. But the book also holds those stark realities up against the miracle of the everyday, like a newborn’s soft scalp: “Glory / to the goddamn / peach fuzz on his head.” Candid and sincere, sensual and grounded, this collection is an intimate and masterful examination of marriage and parenting."
—Lisa Ampleman, author of Mom in Space
"Wendy Wisner’s The New Life is a stunning collection of poems touching on the collective memory and the complexities of women and mothers. Leading with deep compassion, Wisner sees the world through a mother’s eyes, contending with impermanence and complex emotions. Her poems, exploring maternal love and loss—from a grandmother’s stillbirth to the grief of 9/11 and Sandy Hook—remind us of the beauty of a woman’s expansive empathy. Through the wisdom of Wisner’s words, “this is the new life // and I can trust it not to hurt me,” we find a poignant collection full of hope and renewal that all should read."
—Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press)
Morph and Bloom was a finalist for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry and was published by CW Books in 2013.
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Praise for Morph and Bloom:
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“Wendy Wisner reminds us that a family, like the earth, has its seasons. She grafts the joys and worries of motherhood to bloom and to decay—a landscape lit at once by ‘bourbon light’ and ‘margarine winter light.’ Familial love and a devotion to the natural world braid into a gaze that alights on astonishing imagery: ‘he sleeps in goddess pose / and smells like hay.’ These poems are reflective, often searing. These poems blossom again and again into a ‘many-petaled’ splendor.'"
—Eduardo C. Corral
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‘Rescue me now’…someone is being saved, someone is being sought in Wendy Wisner’s Morph and Bloom, though it isn’t always clear who: the mother, the sister, the grandfather, the infant. Two generations of childhoods are layered against one another, as—in all their danger, all their physicality, all their light and dark sublimity—the early years of her mothering are shown to us. And there is absolutely no way to say it better than Wisner does—those years are spent ‘clinging to the waves of a different sea.’ ”
—Sarah Vap
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Review by Grace Cavalieri (Washington Review of Books)
Review by Kara Dorris (Lingerpost)
Review by Katherine Stutzman (Literary Mama)
Review by Tessara Dudley (Mom Egg Review)
Epicenter was a runner up for the CustomWords Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, the Word Works Washington Prize, and the Main Street Rag Book Award. It was published by CW Books in 2004.
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Praise for Epicenter:
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“Wendy Wisner’s assured first book finds at the core of family both unease and tenderness. Her best poems possess a strange interiority that makes them feel lit from within.”
—Mark Doty
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“I am thrilled and moved by Wendy Wisner’s Epicenter. I want to invent new words to herald the emergence of this wonderful young poet. She is delicate, but never dainty; she is exquisitely sensitive to the nuances of feeling that constitute our inner life, but never hermetic. These poems, one after the other, take my breath away and give breath back to me. What a great gift this book is.”
—Jan Heller Levi
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“It’s a compelling, confiding, sometimes awe-struck voice that speaks through these poems. A woman at moments of discovery, surprised at what she has found. These poems are tender and unwavering, erotic in the largest sense of the word — in love with the world, with pennies and record players, tablecloths, and cell-phone chargers. Lyrical, interior, grounded in the beauties and struggles of daily life, family life, Epicenter is a thrilling, heartbreaking first book of poems.”
—Donna Masini
Another Place of Rocking is a sequence of prose poems about growing up on Martha’s Vineyard with hippie-activist parents. It was a finalist for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize, the Richard Snyder Memorial Prize, the University of Arkansas Poetry Series, and was a runner up for the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Competition.
Another Place of Rocking was published as a chapbook by Pudding House Press in 2010.
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Read some sample poems here:
from Verse Daily
