“Welcome a bright new poet to the world! Jennifer Saunders romances the uncanny as she unveils the pleasures and the restlessness of that sometimes nesting bird—the housewife. Too often torn between a desire for adventure and a desire for stability, a desire to learn everything to protect family and the world, and a frustration with daily life when it lacks utilitarian or emotional value, we follow Jennifer Saunders on her lyric celebration of the quotidian because it is our own, and she captures for us the strangeness of even our most ordinary moments.”
—Sandra Alcosser, author of A Fish to Feed All Hunger and Except by Nature
“The charming poems of Jennifer Saunders’ debut collection are a joy to read—laced with smart observations about our domestic lives and almost humble self-realizations. Whether she’s observing “the first goldfinch of spring/in your cupped hands, its frantic beating heart,” or becoming a crow, or “draw[ing] arching eyebrows/that almost/resemble expression,” Saunders holds steady to her “housewife’s” aesthetic, which is also a poet’s aesthetic. “Why pretend,” the poet asks, “things don’t blow away?””
—Gail Wronsky, author of Imperfect Pastorals
“Jennifer Saunders’ poems are thoughtful, sharply observed and complete in themselves as washed stones. She writes wryly of pain and disappointment. She has a clear and accurate eye. She is never sloppy or wordy but many of these poems stick in you with their sharp points, getting under your skin. These are poems of everyday life but there’s nothing boring or expected about them.”
—Marge Piercy
Jennifer Saunders is a poet living in German-speaking Switzerland. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Dunes Review, The Georgia Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, San Pedro River Review, Spillway, The Shallow Ends, and elsewhere and has been nominated for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize. She earned her MFA in poetry from Pacific University and in the winters she works as a trainer in a hockey school in Bern, Switzerland.
