Books by Diane Jarvenpa

Diane Jarvenpa is the author of Divining the Landscape (New Rivers Press), Ancient Wonders, the Modern World (Red Dragonfly Press), The Tender Wild Things (New Rivers Press) recipient of the Midwest Independent Publishers Association book award in poetry, swift, bright, drift (Red Dragonfly Press), and The Way She Told Her Story (New Rivers Press), which received a Northeastern Minnesota Book Award honorable mention. Her new book, Shy Lands, is forthcoming from  Blue Light Press. She has received artist initiative and fellowship grants in writing from the Minnesota State Arts Board. She is a teaching artist with the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project. She has worked for the past thirty years with a wide range of poets, writers, students, musicians and artists. She has presented poetry readings at colleges, universities and literary festivals as well as given poetry workshops and classes working with a range of ages from young children to older adults.

Happy to announce the publication of my new book of poetry, Shy Lands, from Blue Light Press.

Shy Lands by Diane Jarvenpa

“There is a subtle and proficient music in Diane Jarvenpa’s poems. We become aware that despite the sorrow and anguish we might feel about the hell that humans have made of much of our natural world, we can still immerse ourselves in what has not been lost. Her poems remind us that we can find solace and belonging in that “light” and “articulate wonder” which can “fit so completely into the grooves of all our shadows.” -Freya Manfred, author of Loon in Late November Water

“While Diane Jarvenpa is a self-described shy person from a shy family in a shy land, she is a fierce poet. Shy Lands, describes an imaginatively animated world, all the elements of nature which the poet has observed, consumed, and returned to the reader in another form through some exercise of magical alchemy. The country Diane Jarvenpa inhabits, the country we all inhabit, is ravaged and threatened, but still, with her power to convert the observed into a “cold wild song,” she finds for all of us some kind of inspired redemption.” -Tim Nolan, author of Lines

“Diane Jarvenpa’s latest collection, Shy Lands, teaches us how to engage the natural world with the careful listening of an introvert. Her attention draws us to the tiny things that make up a whole landscape, and that, she tells us, “is where the village of [her] mind has brought [her].” She uses words the way an impressionist painter deploys color, “know[ing] how all this works, the close and the distant, / the heap and faded, / the swoop and the click.” This new beauty is only possible in a shy and quiet land, the one she creates for us here.” -Joyce Sutphen, author of Carrying Water to the Field

Shy Lands is available on Amazon.

Anthologies