Planning My Escape: Poetry by Mary Jo Homstad

A sparkling collection of poetry from the late Iowa poet Mary Jo Homstad (1947-1978). A sensitive and witty craftsperson shares her sense of magic in the people and unique landscape of northeast Iowa, her struggles with the chaos of love and her confrontations with the mystery of death. In his moving Foreword, folk artist Greg Brown writes that Mary’s poems are born in the holy and the daily flies out of them: tomatoes, old bodies, dust, family members. And yet: Her poems slide easy as water.

A college classmate of Homstad’s, who went on to become and English professor at their alma mater, says of Planning My Escape:

These poems are the work of a talented young poet whose life was cut short before that talent could be fully developed, a loss for us all. We should think of Keats and the Romantics. Like them, Mary saw a continuity between nature and self, or subjectivity, and used poetry to explore how the experience of one was formative of the other. In her poetry the spiritual inhabits the material world, and the struggle is joined between modern emptiness and the fullness of an open heart.

• Nicholas Eric Preus, emeritus professor of English, Luther College

Most of these 145 poems were previously collected in Weavings, published in 1980, shortly after the poet’s death. A first print run of 600 copies led to a second edition. A dozen poems appear here in print for the first time.

Mary thought of herself as a poet, according to her brother Carl. Planning My Escape is likely to make that opinion universal.

You are in for a lively ride.