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Wild Gardens
In her inspiring and lyrical debut poetry collection, Sara Letourneau looks at our world and one’s life experiences with empathy and wide-open eyes. The book allows us to inhabit terrain that is physical—the shores of Cape Cod, the lava fields of Iceland, parks in Massachusetts and New York City—and emotional. Poems about grief, love, and mental health coexist with poems about travel, spirituality, and the natural world like flowers in a nursery. Wild Gardens shows us how to live with wonder, perceptiveness, and gratitude for the extraordinary and the everyday.
Praise for 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 posses 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 How Air Is and Art of Enlightenment, among others
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, Icelandic tap water, even a drop of frankincense oil. 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
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 a 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
Praise for 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 posses 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 How Air Is and Art of Enlightenment, among others
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, Icelandic tap water, even a drop of frankincense oil. 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
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 a 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
104 pages, Paperback
Published August 18, 2024
1 person is currently reading
6 people want to read
About the author
Sara Letourneau
9 books61 followersIndependent book editor and writing coach. Poet and freelance writer. Visit my business website if you'd like to work together on your manuscript and other projects!
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 12, 2024
From Cape Cod to Iceland, travel through the beauty and realness of Letourneau's Wild Gardens and you won't be disappointed. Her words are filled with emotion, imagery, and a vulnerability that is relatable to all. The collection is a reminder of our connection to Mother and self. Highly recommend reading and reflecting on.
September 21, 2024
Sara's poems are so beautiful. They take you to the place. You feel what the animal is thinking and feeling. You are right there in whatever moment the poem is describing.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews