Here Beyond Small Wonders by Becky Boling

 

Becky Boling, League of Minnesota Poets poetry prize winner, offers her first collection of 37 poems in Here Beyond Small Wonders. Filled with vivid description of locales from the ice-covered pond in her backyard to the vast expanse of Lake Michigan, she works with contrasts of scale, as in Adirondack Chair in Snow, and ironies of context. Her tiny hummingbirds fly the Hudson River. Her poems describe subjects as small as the magnified fly on her windowsill in Musca Domestica.

 

Boling’s language yields striking phrases: Stridulating cicadas populate late summer’s air. Her employ of a conceit terms us “squatters, who lease the land from rabbits… who leave baby carrots on back porch steps…who watch….” A chronological list provides evidence of former tenants who lie in stone gardens under mounds of earth.

 

The poems on these pages make the most of a variety of forms, including some intriguing shape poems befitting the Co-Poet Laureate of Northfield. Enjoy this volume for its close observation of a broad landscape.

–Mary Moore Easter, The Way She Wants to Get There (Nodin Press)

 

The world in this book is a place of danger and wonder. Dead flies on a windowsill, a dead ant in the shower, and a dog’s discovery of a dead mouse reveal “the terrors of creation.” To counter loss, Becky Boling translates otherwise mundane experiences into moments of wonder. Autumn leaves are “love letters pinned/to tree limbs,” pumpkins sprout into carriages, and a community garden thriving in a city reminds us it’s never too late to salvage grace. Eden exists, but it’s temporary. While the humans in Here Beyond Small Wonders are “shipwrecked islanders” washed up on earth’s shore, hope lies in the capacity to imagine, as Boling does, the reciprocity possible in a world tended with care.

–Diane LeBlanc, The Feast Delayed

 

It comes as no surprise that Becky Boling is a regular contributor to a poetry journal called Visual Verse. She writes with a painterly eye, employing a rich palate of colors and deft brushstrokes to create art out of the ordinary and the ephemeral. One of the beauties of Here Beyond Small Wonders is how the poems play off one another, how the poet moves from the colors of the sunset to the colors of her laundry on the line, how her sunlit attention ranges through the world to illuminate its small wonders. Through the precision of her language and the acuity of her eye, Becky Boling makes everything in these poems both instantly familiar and refreshingly new.

–Rob Hardy Author of Shelter in Place (Finishing Line Press)

 

Beyond Small Wonders is the best book of poems I’ve read in a decade. Becky Boling has created a collection of work that balances challenging circumstance with safety. Great poetry should push boundaries and make you feel good. This book does both. I had a hard time deciphering if these poems were inspired by Mary Oliver or Silvia Plath.  In a nutshell…this book is genius.

–Danny Klecko, 2020 Midwest Book Award Winner, Hitman Baker Casket Maker