CMW Community

Shari Wagner's second book of poetry, The Harmonist at Nightfall: Poems of Indiana, has just been released by Bottom Dog Press. Wagner's collection explores the Midwest's natural beauty and offers a fresh perspective on a landcape many of us are familiar with.

"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, author of Sailing the Inland Sea: On Writing, Literature, and Land