Rucksacks for the Leaf Cat by Dianna Henning

Dianna MacKinnon Henning taught through California Poets in the Schools, received several California Arts Council grants and taught poetry workshops through the William James Association’s Prison Arts Program, including Folsom Prison, Diamond View Middle School and runs “The Thompson Peak Writers’ Workshop.” Publications, in part: Naugatuck River Review 2025; Women in a Golden State, 2025; Visions 2025; The Power of the Feminine, Vol. II 2024; One Art Poetry, 2024; Folkways Press; Mocking Heart Review, 2024; Poet News, Sacramento; Worth More Standing, Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees; Voices; Artemis Journal, 2021 & 2022 & 2023; The Adirondack Review; Memoir Magazine;The Tule Review; The Lake, UK; California Quarterly; The Plague Papers, Blue Heron Review, and New American Writing. Nomination by The Adirondack Review for a Pushcart Prize a few years back. MFA in Writing ’89, Vermont College. Recently nominated by Blue Heron Review for a Pushcart for her poem “In the Collage of my Mind/I’m a Simple Design,” her ninth Pushcart nomination 2024. She has a new book “Rucksacks for the Leaf Cat” by Finishing Line Press due out Jan. 2026. Book publications,Poets Corner Press, Black Buzzard Press, Finishing Line Press & Kelsay Books. Website: www.diannahenning.com

PRAISE:

 

Dianna Henning‘s Rucksacks for the Leaf Cat is a rucksack filled with treasures for poetry lovers. We find something for every mood. Every page is carefully wrought, so all that’s left is a crystalline poem. For immediate and lasting book pleasure.

–Grace Cavalieri, Maryland’s tenth Poet Laureate

 

To enter Dianna Henning‘s poems is to enter a natural world that is both realistically and metaphorically described, and which also leaves you “standing on the rim of the infinite.” To stand there is to experience the world from the inside out, for as she writes “I was once touched / by such a stone and because / of that I turned human. // But first, I was stone.” Henning’s is an elemental language in the tradition of Rilke, Gluck and Ada Limon, a language that embraces us as we embrace it. The stakes here are lost loves, death, family, and various yearnings, and it is her generous vision where “thoughts become dancing birds, / and the writer at the desk, /a wide-open sky” that gives us an essential and gorgeous poetry that renews us.

–Richard Jackson, author of The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems

 

Dianna Henning‘s personal truth carrying poems intertwine nature and human landscapes. Her words speak of the grit and grief moments in a life being well lived. We are on a journey with her as we feel the ache of what love is, encounter challenges of the greater world, and look to survive the high stakes of living. In the end we witness the resilience of carrying on. “I’ve learned to listen with my mouth.”/To make words with wings.”/ “To carry myself without fear of what’s ahead.”/ These poems lift and move us.

–Lara Gularte, El Dorado County Poet Laureate Emeritus,  Author of Kissing the Bee & Fourth World Woman

 

I have admired Dianna Henning‘s poetic insights since we were MFA students together in Vermont. I always envied the delicacy and grace of her lines that veiled their melded strength. In this volume, she explains the heart of her craft by writing “My throat is a winding river / where words carry me / into the sanctity of all.” Luscious scenes of love mingle with the laments of grief, the revulsion of war. Yet Dianna eloquently blends all these images with the songs she creates. “I’ve learned to make words with wings,” she writes, as she instructs us how her “thoughts become dancing birds.”

–Sara Lindsay Rath, MacDowell Fellow and author of several books  published by the University of Wisconsin Press

 

If “dark’s no trouble, except when you’re in the thick of it” then this book beautifully examines all the layers of darkness and how it collaborates with the light. There is an unfolding of the themes of loss, war, our natural world and living in times of war, both internal and external. In these pages, your will find lava flows, the Yuba River, Vermont backwoods, moths from Madagascar, and wooden knobs that tell stories of the wind. Each poem finds “a certain quiet that rises” and in that quiet, we may find ourselves “threading sunlight across a mountainous terrain.”

–Connie Post, Author of Prime Meridian and Between Twilight

 

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/dianna-mackinnon-henning/rucksacks-for-the-leaf-cat/