Wild Gardens

If you were to cross the poetry of Ursula K. Le Guin and that of Mary Oliver, you might very well get Sara Letourneau's Wild Gardens. These poems possess the type of exquisite experience of nature that Oliver offers, laced through and through with a bravery that marks Le Guin's verse at its best. Letourneau not only walks through the world; she strides across it with an insistence that beauty is strength and strength (especially hers) is beautiful.

-Wayne-Daniel Berard, author of Art of Enlightenment and How Air Is



Wild Gardens is populated by intimate poems of address-to readers, yes, but also to the "wolf's cry" of metal music, to a great egret in Central Park, to Icelandic tap water, to a Tibetan singing bowl. And sometimes they inhabit, speaking as North Atlantic right whale or frankincense oil. These are poems of learning to love one's self amidst the "violent vigilance" of anxiety, pandemic, environmental concern, and loss. Despite diminishing glaciers and Earth swallowing its own rivers, "somehow grief fails to blind me," Sara Letourneau writes, reintroducing us to a world that remains "too candescent / to know how to sleep."

-Rebecca Hart Olander, author of Uncertain Acrobats



Sara Letourneau's poems express a sensibility driven by widening rings of empathy. Metalhead in a sundress, she reveals her identification with Others, ranging from Cape Cod as a conscious entity, to a predatory osprey, a dying glacier, and much more. Darkness, "the toxins and dead cells of self," grief, a personal implosion in the night-all these are present as well. But in a world "bursting with contradiction," compassion appears in the most unexpected places, like an anonymous love note found at a gas pump. Sympathetic vibrations greet us everywhere: wander into these Wild Gardens yourself!

-David P. Miller, author of Bend in the Stair and Sprawled Asleep