Slender Warble

“A rich chorus of paradox, Susan Cowger’s Slender Warble harmonizes the weather of fear, faith, and flight. By bee, hawk, gull, and the wide wings of the Spirit; by the alarm of accident, groan of grief, ‘caesura / between worlds,’ or full-throated song of glory, we soar on these poems, hover, plummet, rise to soar again.”


—Marjorie Maddox, author of True, False, None of the Above





“All of the poems in Slender Warble by Susan Cowger are fully engaged in the search for God: attempting to know the unknowable, trying to grasp the intangible in our always-failing human hands. We teeter between the daily paradox of suffering and beauty, all too often unable to see or sense God in the struggles of our quotidian lives. . . . Highly recommended.”


—Barbara Crooker, author of The Book of Kells





“In Susan Cowger’s deeply satisfying poems, spirit infuses the flesh of things to renew our love for the ardency of the given world. Even in simple actions, like peeling and eating fruit, everything is always at stake, at once present and ultimate. . . . A back becomes a landscape, then the shape of breath, and finally the shape of a promise—these poems enact the transfigurations of imagination and celebrate the distinctness and shared life of our experience.”


—D. S. Butterworth, Professor of English, Gonzaga University





“In her Note to Readers, poet Susan Cowger reminds us that ‘the presence of God reliably resists being pinned down.’ The pages that follow illuminate that tension with breathless beauty; not only the natural imagery, but the poems’ unpunctuated open spaces echo his powerful yet inscrutable ways. Cowger paints alongside him with ‘Thunderheads / [that] blossom between mine and Thine’s / lines,’ songs that call us closer to the deep.”


—Tania Runyan, author of Second Sky and What Will Soon Take Place