Connie Wanek . . . is superb, mature and] a master of mood and language. "St. Paul Pioneer Press"

No poet I know, with the exception of Jane Kenyon, is as able to discover the magic and depth in ordinary, day-to-day life and to artfully render that vision for the reader. Louis Jenkins

Connie Wanek s third book of poems, "On Speaking Terms," is amusing, tender, and surprising. Herself a librarian in Duluth, Minnesota, Wanek s poems emerge from everyday objects Scrabble, garlic, lipstick, hawkweed and the landscapes, waterscapes, and severe winters of the upper Midwest....

For decades a restorer of old homes, Connie Wanek shows us that poetry is everywhere, encountered as easily in the waterways, landscapes, and winters of Minnesota, as in the old roofs and darkened drawers of a home long uninhabited. Rival Gardens includes more than thirty unpublished poems, along with poems selected from three previous books all in Wanek s unmistakable voice: plainspoken and elegant, unassuming and wise, observant and original. Many of her new poems focus on the garden, beginning with the Garden of Eden.A deep feeling for family and for the losses and gains of growing...