Wendy McVicker
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wendy McVicker, 2020-2022 poet laureate of Athens, Ohio, is a longtime Ohio Arts Council teaching artist. Her previous books include the dancer’s notes (Finishing Line Press, 2015), the self-published collaboration with visual artist John McVicker Sliced Dark (2019), Zero, a Door (The Orchard Street Press, 2021), and Stronger When We Touch, a collaboration with poet Cathy Cultice Lentes (The Orchard Street Press, 2023). She loves collaborating with artists in many media and performs with instrumentalist Emily Prince under the name “another language altogether” whenever she gets the chance. Her children having grown and flown, she lives surrounded by the green hills of southeastern Ohio with her husband and a Hemingway cat named Dora.
Meanderlines
by Wendy McVicker
ISBN: 978-1-962405-92-8
$16.00 ($4.63 US Shipping)
Pre-order discount
$12.80 ($4.63 US Shipping)
through October 18
ABOUT THE BOOK
Wendy McVicker’s Meanderlines considers water, necessary for survival and everywhere endangered, as both a physical and a metaphorical element. Manifesting as rain, as rivers, or as creeks, lakes, and oceans, water, with its always-shifting borders, flows, surges, drowns, and sustains; water shapes landscapes and ourselves. Here, the lyrical, narrative, and often meditative poems explore questions of change, resilience, and loss. As powerful ecopoetry, this collection leaves one with a sense of reverence and awe, more attuned to the many ways we change and are changed by the landscapes in which we live.
ADVANCE PRAISE
Wendy McVicker writes in her powerful first full collection of poems, Meanderlines, that the secret of water is islands, / their suggestion of possibility. And thus, these evocative, image-rich poems are concerned with water, yes, but also the places along water’s shifting boundaries, both as a physical reality and as a metaphor for the shifting borders of self. Language, too, is a sort of borderland, and the words we use can be meander lines, which the poet tells us are human records of the edges between water and land. These poems flow between interior and exterior, past and present, and like water, are persistent, and keen, entering and enlarging the crevices of our consciousness.
—Pauletta Hansel, Cincinnati Poet Laureate Emerita, 2026 Judy Gaines Young Awardee,
and author of Understory: A Women’s History of Appalachia.
Meanderlines, Athens, Ohio, poet Wendy McVickers’ sixth collection of poetry, is a celebration of the poet’s lifelong connection to waterways, of how bodies of water inhabit her imagination. McVicker explores the lure of water, its potential to sculpt what it comes in contact with, and how humans have manipulated waterways, often with unforeseen results. McVicker’s lyric poetry feels shaped by breath and observation, by intuition and questioning, “How can one . . . not dissolve in wonder?” Above all, as an invitation to readers to deepen their connection to waterways, Meanderlines offers a chance to meditate and meander.
—Bonnie Proudfoot, author of Incomer and Household Gods
ABOUT THE COVER ARTIST
Molly Schoenhoff is a neurodivergent artist, educator, and poet with a background in design, typography, and college teaching. Motivated by environmental concerns and a curiosty about the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life, her creative practice explores the regenerative nature of materials, language and meaning. The artwork depicted on the cover of Meanderlines is machine-stitched paper made from abaca fiber, fermented grass, recycled blue jeans, and a worn flannel sheet. Her work has been published and exhibited in numerous artistic and scholarly media. She holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design.
Alone in the Burning
by Wendy McVicker
ISBN: 9781962405072
$14.00 ($4.00 US Shipping)
ABOUT THE BOOK
Alone in the Burning reveals a watchful, sensitive child trying to find a way to thrive in a difficult environment. In spare, lyrical language, McVicker gives us a collection of imagistic poems that evoke the child’s claustrophobic world, blended with prose poems that create complication, momentum, and tension, drawing the reader into the search to connect to intuition, the need to find a way through the burning, to breathe. Language and the natural world provide her with clues, pointing to freedom and authentic self-hood. Reading Alone in the Burning is like listening to a piano fugue, notes dropping one by one into silence, each enlarging our awareness with subtle echoes that continue to resonate after we’ve turned the last page.
ADVANCE PRAISE
In Alone in the Burning, we enter the experience of a child disoriented by her domestic environment, a perilous landscape where time seems to be measured by emotional displacements and inversions of scale. Learning to read, she finds that books form “causeways / through the swamp / away / from the rising tide.” This is a vivid, poignant exploration of how we create and are created by stories as we hunger for the generational healing that sometimes seems almost within reach.
––Claire Bateman, author of Wonders of the Invisible World and The Pillow Museum
Wendy McVicker’s Alone in the Burning is powerful collection of poems offering us the inner life of a child in danger. “How to tell this story from the heart of the fire? / How far must we fly to escape the embers?” the speaker asks in the opening poem. Yet there is beauty and safety in the child’s experience of both the world outside this burning house and within the world of words where “one sentence / one tree was all // it took to fly.” And fly at last she does, as this “is a story about a girl who learned to live in books,” and ultimately to tell the tale through these spare, image-laden poems that “tell it slant” with heartbreaking precision.
––Pauletta Hansel, poet and 2022 Writer in Residence
for the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County
