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Hayden Saunier's Wheel offers us pleasure after pleasure of finely tuned lyric poems that contemplate the circularity of being, its darkness, its hope. Largely agrarian, the poems refresh us as when the poet writes, "Into the spring-fed heart of the creek's deep pool / I plunged"; they also amuse us with dark humor and shock us with news of the day told slantwise. Here is Saunier at the top of her craft, gifting us with sonnets and pantoums as well as poems in free verse. Above all, these are poems of much wisdom expressed with gentle humility, poems of things botanical, animal, and human, all that flourishes and falls. The poet is ever mindful of the on-goingness of being. Read these poems and savor them, as one savors existence and its great turning.
-Lynn Levin, House Parties
About the author
Hayden Saunier is the author of five previous collections of poems, most recently A Cartography of Home (Terrapin Books, 2021). Her awards include a 2023 Pushcart Prize, the 2013 Gell Poetry Award, the 2011 Rattle Poetry Prize, and the 2011 Pablo Neruda Award. Her work has been published in such journals as Beloit Poetry Journal, Nimrod, Southern Poetry Review, The Sun, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her poems have also been featured on Poetry Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and Verse Daily. A professional actor, she is the founder and director of No River Twice, a community-driven interactive poetry group that combines poetry and performance. She lives on a farm in Pennsylvania.
