Denise Pendleton holds an MFA in Poetry from Washington University and a Masters in Literacy from the University of Maine. Her poems have appeared in dozens of online and print publications, including American Sports Poems Anthology, Northwest Review, Deep Water, Tar River Poetry and Kerning. Denise lives in Searsmont, Maine. Recently retired from a career of teaching and promoting reading and writing, she now volunteers on the boards of Belfast Senior College and Searsmont Town Library.
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PRAISE:
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In the poignant, loamy soil of the poems in her new collection Open the Door, Denise Pendleton mines the complex intersection of past and present through the shifting lens of the natural world, family, marriage, and motherhood, exploring the gravitational push and pull of all the places—external and internal—she has called home. Pendleton’s voice is at once gentle and sure, curious and earnest, warm and wistful—the poems feel guided by her commitment to “untangle root clusters” of stories lived and longed for, to “make wholeness” in the spaces where it might have “seemed there was none.” Pendleton’s tender approach and sure-footed attunement work to try and capture both “all that needed saying” and what can fill us “without speaking, without voice.” There is a delicate balancing act in this work, hovering as it does in the span between the easy frolicking of childhood and the reckoning of the body’s “wither and decay,” but in Pendleton’s hands the poems invite us past the “creaks and complaints” and into the “earth we will return to,” where we can neither “keep the outside out” nor can we refute the signs that “there is more.” The poems cast a burnished glow around experiences that reflect the companionship and solitude of a life, and by the final offering, connect readers to what remains “pulsing, joyful, and fierce within us” all.
–Maya Stein, poet, writing guide, creative adventuress, author of Margin Release, an incomplete memoir
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Denise Pendleton‘s work brims with heart but holds nothing back. These poems meander a vibrant and authentic cycle of life with a lyrical precision that almost redefines intimacy.
–Ellen Sander Author, Hawthorne, A House in Bolinas, a poetic memoir
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