MennoLink Books and Music

Motion and rhythms and round words roll through the poems in Part 2, the more familiar hallmarks of Janzen's rumbling universe. She brings longing to every page, and then calls us in, gently, yet irresistibly. Among these 43 new poems are "skin and Air," "The Uprooting," "Lifting You," "Architecture of Falling," and "Holding On to the Walls."

Copyright 2008 Good Books

Janzen's poems send us to explore the mystery of our connections to this earth our dust and it's dust. These poems show us with certainty what we sense persistently--that we are unequivocally physical and yet undeniably spiritual, so ephemeral and yet so bound.

In this collection we find the suspension, the uncertainty in our humanity--our tensile hold on what we want and wish for, yet the fleeting time we spend loving and living. Copyright 1999.

"After the elation of giving birth
our new daughter fed and sleeping,
I stand under the warm water
And begin on the high notes-
Madame Butterfly's ecstasy,
Sliding over my body.

After the loss of his bride,
Our friend turns on the guestroom
Shower and begins his long wailing.
It echoes through the house,
Flows down the stairway,
His baritone cries rising and falling.
Over and over, the full octaves."

And she goes on to mark the full-throated human experience, placing her 42 poems into these sections: "Broken Places," "The Garden," "Carving the Hollow," and finally, "Piano in the Vineyard." In every poem Janzen is utterly conscious of the unspeakable wonder and terror of being alive.

Copyright 2004 Good Books.