Little House, Big House

Poetry. Wild and serious, so direct she can be awkward, so elegant she can sweep me off my figurative feet, Waldner’s wiry poems can make her sound like a visitor from another world inside our own, a world whose inhabitants have read everything, have felt as we have felt only more so, and then came here looking for home, repository of pleasure and passion / Made up out of time place and words. Compare her to Dickinson, Berryman, Bernadette Mayer, or just conclude that she’s incomparable as she wields the language of medieval scholars or the language of kids: In Iowa, in New England, on Vancouver Island, even in childhood (the time I led my fellow Brownies into the wrong car in the parking lot) she’s a lodestar, an art-punk key to every mystery, a heartbreaker, a tearjerker, an escape artist, someone to emulate. Read her and discover yourself.–Stephen Burt