By Daneen Wardrop

Winner of the 2015 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize, selected by David St. John.

Available from:  Ashland Bookstore  |  Amazon

PREVIEW

• Winner of the gold "IPPY" in Poetry from the 2017 Independent Publisher Book Awards

Praise for Life As It:

Daneen Wardrop’s prose poems are trim, sleek, loaded with meaning. They show light compression and suggest curious backstories that gets the reader to larger issues. People want to know why we’re here, what life is truly about. We can’t stop questioning until we get answers, as “Beethoven,” indicates:

“Does it matter if we find the root note of a heartbeat? Not in the name of Enoughness, but of what lets us go.”

St. Theresa of Avila takes a turn through these poems to demonstrate the capabilities of a mystical thinking that can see situations from the views of both the Self and the Other at once.

- Todd Mercer, lead poetry judge for the 2017 Independent Publisher Book Awards.

"Life As It proves Daneen Wardrop’s mastery of voice. In these pieces, the past, present and future coalesce in bright bursts, and, through juxtaposition and accumulation, the connections become ever more compelling, and beautiful, and edgy, and interesting as they unspool.  This is poetry of both narrative and musical accomplishments, and a book one won’t forget." 

– Laura Kasischke, author of The Infinitesimals

These poems are a diary of exquisite attention. Daneen Wardrop’s mind is meditative in pacing yet poetic in the way it creates a new way of seeing. “A cupola of wild geese launches a mansion” is equally accurate and miraculous, and just one example of her gentle yet transformative focus. She’s adept at mining a moment for what it naturally contains, rather than forcing it into predetermined avenues of feeling or thought. This a poet who possesses that rare human quality – a gracious consciousness. 

– Bob Hicok, author of Sex & Love &

• Read an interview with the author in Literary Mama, published January 2018.
• Listen to a radio interview with the author on WMUK, Western Michigan University's NPR station. 
• Read a book review on "Today's Book of Poetry" February 2017. 
• Sample the poems "Blue Jay and Something Else," "From a Place Other Than the Lake," and "If Never the Why then at Least the How" printed in Blackbird.
• Sample the poem "Lie" from Ecotone, volume 15. 
• 8-minute radio show broadcast with Daneen Wardrop  

About the Author

Daneen Wardrop has published two books of poetry, Cyclorama, published in 2015, and The Odds of Being, published in 2007. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, New American Writing, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Wardrop has also authored several books of literary criticism, including most recently Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing (2009, University Press of New England).