Summary (also available by PDF flier): As she contends with forces that threaten to uproot what she loves, the farm wife emerges as a prophetic voice from America's heartland, embracing a concept of community that includes the dead and the living, neighbors and strangers, cultivated fields and ditches thick with milkweed. This is exemplified in "The Writer's Almanac" reading of the poem "The farm wife turn's off the TV evangelist."

Through the poems in The Farm Wife’s Almanac, we are privy to the bittersweet story of a Mennonite woman beset by forces that threaten her farm and rural community. With candor and wit, she defends handkerchiefs, clotheslines, unlocked doors, and unmown ditches. She steps outside to predict the weather, avoids restaurants with booths “so tall, you can’t see your neighbors,” and denounces a corporate hog farm that would expand production of “boxed-up piglets” by razing her barn and despoiling a creek.  

Reviewing in Mennonite Quarterly Review, Abigail Carl-Klassen says that "Wagner’s collection is unique in using its organizational structure and traditional forms in ways that are liturgical and meditative to embrace and subvert the lived and imagined experiences of women on the farm, in all its forms, past, present, and future.”

“These poems are treasures unpacked and gleaming with quiet passion, humor, and wisdom. Wagner gently lifts the life of a farm wife into view, then dazzles the reader with insights that surprise and enlarge, drawing us into the history of both restriction and wonder, so that we too can imagine 'releasing the parachutes of milkweed' for the return of 'whirling monarchs so thick they block the sun.'” —Jean Janzen, Author, What the Body Knows

“The farm wife names children after beloved cows, plays rook, and wants to be buried in a root cellar. In poem after poem we see what might appear to be a sheltered, insular life in its true and astonishing expansiveness. These are poems of both intensity and calm beauty, transformative in their vision of the holiness in the everyday.”— Jill Peláez Baumgaertner, Author, What Cannot Be Fixed and Poetry Editor, The Christian Century

“’Iva’s tongue was honey-sweet and stung like a bee,’ the poet writes, an apt description of Wagner’s own poetic gifts, on full display in The Farm Wife’s Almanac. Rich in pathos and humor, this is a collection that embodies the culture from which it was birthed, a true celebration of living close to the land. As one of Wagner’s farm wives says, ‘I’d shun the plain, gray stones in Yoder Cemetery. Bury me in a root cellar, I’d say, with garlands of garlic and chili peppers, among gems of peach and plum and cherry.’ And those bright canning jars, the soil’s rich aroma, the fruit of the land captured and hidden in the dark of the cellar, mark Wagner’s own particular vision, making this an almanac full of wisdom, forecasting a part of the agrarian world that is too quickly disappearing.” —Todd Davis, Author, Native Species and Winterkill

The Author: Shari Wagner was Indiana Poet Laureate 2016-2017 and is author of two books of poems: The Harmonist at Nightfall: Poems of Indiana and Evening Chore. As co-author she contributed to the writing of Gerald L. Miller's memoir, A Hundred Camels. Her poems have appeared in many magazines, including North American Review, Shenandoah, The Christian Century, The Writer’s Almanac, and American Life in Poetry. She has taught creative writing in elementary schools, high schools, colleges, community centers, libraries, and nursing homes. She teaches for the Indiana Writers Center; Indiana University-Purdue University’s Religion, Spirituality and the Arts Seminar; and Bethany Theological Seminary’s School of Religion’s Theopoetics program.

Cover artist: Grateful acknowledgment is made to John Domont for permission to have his painting incorporated in the cover (painting not to be reproduced separately from cover)

Quote: One of the closing farm wife poems, “The farm wife reviews the Tornado Theater at Menno-Hof Museum,” reports that “In the rubble of Eli Yoder’s house /all they found intact was a glass jug / with a carving stuck inside: ‘Fear God’ /  on one side— ‘God Is Love’ on the other. /  Eli took that as a sign of the Almighty’s power, / but I believe whirling wind spins the bottle /  and God is in the dark with us, / not writing down what happens next.”

Market:  Anyone interested in poems prophetic and inspiring from a poet laureate who passionately tells of the losses and gifts of life as viewed through the prism of farming.

Shelving: Poetry; Anabaptist-Mennonite literature. BISAC: Poetry; RTM: 640 Poetry

Publisher: Cascadia Publishing House LLC
Imprint: DreamSeeker Books
Copublisher: None
Publication date: July 2019
Approximate Pages: 116
Tentative Format: 5.5 x 8.5" trade paper
Prices: $13.95 US/Can. ISBN 13: 978-1-68027-015-0  ISBN 13: 1-68027-015-X