Jeanne Wagner
Jeanne Wagner
Jeanne Wagner is the author of four chapbooks and three full-length collections: The Zen Piano-mover, which won the NFSPS Poetry Prize, In the Body of Our Lives, published by Sixteen Rivers Press, and her most recent, Everything Turns Into Something Else, published in 2020 as runner-up for the Grayson Book Prize. She is the winner of the 2021 Joy Harjo Award and the 2022 Cloudbank Poetry Prize, among others. Her work has
appeared in North American Review, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, SWWIM, and The Southern Review.
In the Body of Our Lives
“Jeanne Wagner’s poetry rides through a landscape both familiar in its humanity and astonishingly new. Her fluid syntax and inventive diction flood into hidden and unexpected fissures of experience and memory. She seems to carve out new spaces where images pour into and out of one another and where metaphors appear like undiscovered species, strange yet perfectly adapted to her world. Her imagination ranges from the cellular level to the cosmic reaches and from the Arctic to the Flamingo Motel of Berkeley. She activates the nuances of language itself, its near-lost etymologies and inherent double entendres, to explore the dark complications of home and relationship, grief, emotional deafness, the estranging skin, sin, and redemption. These poems move and amaze and consistently enlighten.”
—Jeanne Emmons
Jeanne’s poem “Ephemeral Lakes” won the 2013 Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred. Read Jeanne’s poem here.
Read Jeanne’s poem “My mother was like the bees” which appeared in column 366 of Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry.
Read the interview with Jeanne by Zara Raab, who is one of our anthology poets, in her “Writing Around the Bay” column in the November 14, 2011 San Francisco Book Review.