Review by Katherine Stutzman ( Literary Mama) R eview by Grace Cavalieri ( Washington Review of Books)

And there is absolutely no way to say it better than Wisner does-those years are spent ‘clinging to the waves of a different sea.’ ” -Sarah Vap Two generations of childhoods are layered against one another, as-in all their danger, all their physicality, all their light and dark sublimity-the early years of her mothering are shown to us. ‘Rescue me now’…someone is being saved, someone is being sought in Wendy Wisner’s Morph and Bloom, though it isn’t always clear who: the mother, the sister, the grandfather, the infant. These poems blossom again and again into a ‘many-petaled’ splendor.” -Eduardo C. She grafts the joys and worries of motherhood to bloom and to decay-a landscape lit at once by ‘bourbon light’ and ‘margarine winter light.’ Familial love and a devotion to the natural world braid into a gaze that alights on astonishing imagery: ‘he sleeps in goddess pose / and smells like hay.’ These poems are reflective, often searing. “Wendy Wisner reminds us that a family, like the earth, has its seasons. Morph and Bloom was a finalist for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry and was published by CW Books in 2013. Read an interview with me about my work, in Ploughshares. My awards include the 2003 Amy Award from Poets and Writers, and an Academy of American Poets prize. Poems of mine have also appeared in several anthologies. My poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Spoon River Review, Passages North, Tar River Poetry, Bellevue Literary Review, Nashville Review, Minnesota Review, Rhino, THRUSH, and elsewhere. I’m the author of two books of poems and a chapbook.

SPOON by Dana Hay