To the Wren - by Jane Mead (Paperback)

About the Book

Mead's poetry finds beauty in intense and often painful emotions, inviting the idea there is always light and strength within.

Book Synopsis

This massive collection houses Mead's life's work: seven books spanning twenty-seven years. Follow chronologically through decades and become captivated by heartfelt muses on loss, madness, danger, grief, isolation, and self-identity. Her poems explore spaces we often try to ignore and finds a comfortable middleground. Mead candidly and openly weaves together pain and joy until it meshes into glimpses of humanity.

"Mead ... wrote clean, spare, often elegiac lines"

-The New York Times

"I remember her calm voice, her kindness, the incisive clarity of her comments. And now, on the desk beside me, lies To the Wren: Collected and New Poems: 1991-2019 (2019), and although more work may well emerge from other files or rescued papers, no new Jane Mead poems will ever be written. Our imperfect compensation is the current volume, a beautifully designed compendium of finely crafted poems whose world is mortal, suffering, yet vividly alive."

-Ned Balbo for Literary Matters

Review Quotes

"Mead propels readers forward, using plain language that's elegant in its simplicity yet compelling and heartbreaking. Even as she confronts grief and loss, the poet highlights the overriding theme of courage."
--Library Journal

"The natural world, in its bounty and brutality, is a grounding force for Mead, a reminder of a time scale beyond the human span"--Publishers Weekly Starred Review

"Mead's versatility, scholarship, and curiosity contribute to the strength of her craft. . . . Her oeuvre is so spacious that it constantly invites journeys down imagined avenues."--The Rumpus

About the Author

Jane Mead is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently World of Made and Unmade (Alice James, 2016) which was nominated for a National Book Award, as well as a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and the Griffin Prize in Poetry. Her poems appear regularly in journals and anthologies, and she's the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a Lannan Foundation Completion Grant. For many years Poet-in-Residence at Wake Forest University, she manages her family's ranch in northern California. She has taught as a visiting writer at Washington University, Colby College and most recently, The University of Iowa.