“I love Colette Tennant’s work because she is, to paraphrase a description from her new collection of poems, a bootlegger at heart; a poet who recognizes that "…our thirsts/ are vagrant,/ our hungers/ liars and cutthroats…” This is a wonderfully lush collection, as well as erotic, romantic, piercingly intelligent, graceful in its language and feeling. I love the nuance of Tennant’s work, how she captures states of being with seeming effortlessness. Quite an achievement from an exciting voice.”
—Erin Belieu, author of Slant Six
“The incantatory poems in Colette Tennant’s second collection, Eden and After, resound with a haunted music. Possessed by mystery, myth, and magic, obsessed with origin and legacy, these poems seek the “Magnum mysterium.” This book is the call and the response, a litany, and a celebration of faith and doubt. Balanced between silence and song, these poems translate the personal experience into a communal ode to the dark and beautiful secrets we all carry.”
—Stephanie Lenox, author of Congress of Strange People
and The Business, winner of Colorado Poetry Prize 2015
“Sprayed with light, ethereal, feathers on a dark wind—but the artistry makes them a refutation of that very darkness—the tension coming out of paradox.”
—David Dodd Lee, author of Animalites
“Many poets write about nature. Poet Colette Tennant does something quite different: she writes from nature, from the inside of nature. She is able to evoke our own particularly human nature in an original way. At the same time, she also expresses the bond between us and the natural world. Eden and After is an ambitious, inventive book.”
—Peter Sears, author of The Brink, Green Diver, and Small Talk
Colette Tennant was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. She received a B.A. in English from The Ohio State University, a M.A. in English from Longwood University, and a Ph.D. in English from The Ohio State University. Colette is an English professor at Corban University where she teaches literature as well as creative writing. She also teaches art history and literature through their overseas program in Germany, Austria, and Italy. Her first book of poetry, Commotion of Wings, was published in 2010 by Main Street Rag as an Editor’s Choice. She also authored a book of literary criticism titled Reading the Gothic in Margaret Atwood’s First Seven Novels, published in 2003. In 2014, her poem “Smaller” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has had individual poems published in various journals including Southern Poetry Review, Rattle, Christianity and Literature, Dos Passos Review, Natural Bridge, and others. Colette and her husband Stuart have three grown children, Shannon (married to son-in-law Matthew), Byron, and Andrew, and a new grandson, Luke. She enjoys competitive Scrabble, traveling the beautiful Northwest, playing the piano, and composing music.
