Rowing Home by Anna Egan Smucker

Anna Egan Smucker is a poet of the sacred: of trees and rivers, memory and loss, body and story.  Her distinct and compassionate voice bears witness to violence, injustice, heartbreak. and transformation, and offers an anchor amid the falling and dissolving of this life. Rowing Home is a book to share and to come back to. Don’t miss it! –

-George Ella Lyon, Kentucky Poet Laureate 2015-2016

Sorrow and loss may be a bitter weed that “forces its way through my flowers,” but like Gerard Manley Hopkins, poet Anna Smucker recalls to us the sacrament ever renewed in the natural world, calling us to celebrate all that is “green and holy” in our lives.

–Valerie Nieman, author of Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse

Without ever losing her focus on concrete observations of the natural world and human lives, Anna Egan Smucker fills Rowing Home with glints of history, current events, rivers, dogs, trees, and a baker whose pizzelle cookies become a sacrament. The poems are condensed, supple, and many-layered, opening us to the toll industry and war take on human bodies, to the mind of a mass murderer, to participants in the Irish Revolution, and to what it feels like when a nursing mother’s milk unexpectedly lets down.  In the final poems, she even captures a mystical rent in the veil between this world and the others.

–-Meredith Sue Willis, author of Their Houses, Out of the Mountains, and other books