Description:
Fences explores boundaries that define and direct our experiences in this world. Nevertheless, it looks with merriment at the offbeat and ordinary influences encountered on the way, from monks to chicken coops to Elvis.
Brief description: West Virginia author Cheryl Denise grew up in Elmira, Ontario. She graduated from Conestoga College as an RN. She volunteered for three years as a public health nurse in La Jara, Colorado. She and her husband, Mike Miller, volunteered as house leaders for the Mennonite Service Adventure program for teens for three years. Today they live in the intentional community of Shepherds Field in Philippi, West Virginia, in a timber-framed house they built themselves. She enjoys biking, hiking and cross-country skiing with her husband and their good dog, Birkie. This is her third poetry collection, following I Saw God Dancing (DreamSeeker Books, 2005) and What's in the Blood (DreamSeeker, 2012).
Review Quotes:
"In the poem 'Waking to Spring, ' Denise writes, 'I've been collecting words for years / for this exact day, ' and I believe her. Her eye for detail and her ability to find the miraculous in the mundane is remarkable, as if she moves through her life armed with a hand lens and notebook. These are poems of reverence and gratitude, farm life and frustration, but regardless of their subject, Cheryl Denise's poems are full of heart and grace, reminding us that it is a blessing to be wonderfully, imperfectly, perfectly human." -Doug Van Gundy, Author, A Life Above Water
"'I pick him up hitchhiking . . . / his face a plowed field, dirt and stone, but I see that six-year-old, / his full name scrawled across the manger, ' writes Cheryl Denise in a poetry collection which brings much to the fold: the past and the present, the lost and the found. Forthright and vulnerable, the speaker in these compelling poems defies barriers, confronts anxieties, and presents the valuable perspective of a Mennonite poet still attuned to the farm." -Shari Wagner, former Indiana Poet Laureate; Author, The Farm Wife's Almanac