The narrative poetry of Cheryl Denise gathers together her Canadian Mennonite roots, rural life and her attachment to the people and mountains of West Virginia. Her poetry is rich in concrete detail and many poems contain a storytelling quality. Subjects range from sheep farming to lusts and longings, biblical women, legs, old lovers and laundromats. Often humorous, she penetrates to the deep current of human relationship.

"These poems balance between endings and beginnings, between the twilit melancholy of evening and the jubilant rebirth of morning. A grandfather loses his memory, while a toddler meets his shadow for the first time. Survivors tend the graves of ancestors, while the stories of those ancestors, handed down, light the way for those now living. Even while she laments the losses that beset any life, Wagner also celebrates the goodness of growing things in poems charged with the clear light of praise." --Scott Russell Sanders, Author, Hunting for Hope