Valentine’s Dinner at Wren & Wolf by Mary Specker Stone

Rich with luscious and gritty sensual detail, with wildness and coherence, Mary Stone’s poems connect writer and reader to each other and to something beyond ourselves, to “those places at the very edges of a creature.” Stone entices readers into deeper emotional territory through her inventive metaphors. Weather elucidates death, a dam and a father bend nature, and serrano chilis transport us to news we “can barely grip.” Joy and grief are never far from one another in these poems that stay with us long after we have read them.

–Pam Davenport, author of A Midwest Girl Thanks Patti Smith, winner of Slipstream’s 32nd Annual Poetry Chapbook Competition.

Reading Mary Stone’s Valentine’s Dinner at Wren & Wolf is like time traveling through a life, stopping at mile markers: a little girl who didn’t understand how to play war, played with her brothers’ toy soldiers like dolls; a young woman skiing the Mississippi, who will “surely sin, show my tits, drink hurricanes;” a bride who “needs to believe in him;” a wife in a long marriage pondering forgiveness; and a woman at a surgery consult asking, “What’s to become of the nipple?” These poems are full of courage, heart, the ironic view of the speaker, and lessons learned, such as: “Love cannot be forced, must be allowed to flow outward over rocky shelves…pour down, frothing like worshippers at a tent revival.”

–Susan Vespoli, author of Blame It on the Serpent and Cactus as Bad Boy

To sit down and read aloud this mature, elegant collection is to sense an intimate voice just out of hearing.  As Stone reflects on a life’s landscape, we detect the heart’s wordless wisdom like an overtone.  It reassures us that through it all – loves, betrayals, doubts, triumphs – our connections are cherished and forgiven.  “Most tenacious, “she writes, “those places/at the very edge of a creature.”  We are softened and enriched by the experience.

–Kathy Kramer-Howe, poet Lake Mattawa 2020: a pandemic, a small cemetery, and a month alone. Phoenix, Arizona