creatures of promise

Mary Junge’s new collection begins with warnings, declarations, and questions: Are we born for pleasure? Can we ever go back in time? What can we save in this big world of ours? Then birds arrive, and new patterns in new poems, and humans, and more questions, more admonitions, then brief, beautiful lyric portraits, and so many more birds, then an entire bestiary gathered from the world of creatures and vivid portraits of family that lift the heart, break the heart. Colliding with her memories and images of the world we inhabit are Junge’s ferocious political judgments, hard-won and wise. I loved this book. It is a true pleasure to live with a voice so strong, lively, and deep in her book full of images I will not forget.

--Deborah Keenan, author of eleven poetry collections. Her most recent is The Saint of Everything.

These lyrical, steadfast poems are firmly grounded in precise and meaningful images. The pictures in Mary Junge’s poems and her storytelling remind me of Mary Oliver, William Stafford, and William Carlos Williams for their close observation of the natural world. Her poems are wide-ranging and shed light on emotions, the body, killings of Black men by police, love, family, and so much more. Read these poems to focus your sprawling imagination, fix your attention on both the everyday and memories embedded in the heart, and experience life in a new way. Creatures of Promise is a powerful collection.

-Kate Green, author of three books of poetry, four novels and a number of children’s books. Her latest book of poetry is Tourist in the Pure Land.

With her keen observations of the natural world, this poet enables us to glimpse our relationship with the ephemeral world: Here are our local cardinals, hawks, coyotes, deer. And, as the poet travels abroad, we meet condors, manakins, and the scarlet ibis. She has a subtle and skillful way of describing flora and fauna. She gives us entry into her human family too. Even in the shadows of family trauma, missed connections, and an endangered natural world, we share her humor, delight, and pain. We are left with the light of her wise and generous insights. I’m thankful for this expansive view Mary Junge’s poetry offers us.

-Sandra Sidman Larson, author of seven books of poetry. Her most recent, a memoir in poetry, is And Now What Shall We Do?