Description

Poetry by Diane Wahto

Paperback
Publisher: Blue Cedar Press (2018)
ISBN:

Diane Wahto graduated from Wichita State’s MFA program in 1985. She taught at Butler Community College until 2009. She is the president of District 5 Kansas Authors Club and a member of the KAC state board. She is co-editor of three editions of 365 Days, an anthology of poems by the poets on the Facebook 365 Poems in 365 Days. Diane is a well-known writer in the mid-West, especially in Kansas. She has helped many younger and older writers as an official and unofficial mentor. Blue Cedar Press (Wichita, Kansas) is proud to introduce Diane and her poetry to a larger audience with the publication of these powerful poems that capture the love and loss within family and the beauty as well as the trickery of the vast prairie and the human story in metaphor and clarity.

Diane lives in Wichita, Kansas, with her husband Patrick Roche and their dog Annie.

PRAISE FOR THE SAD JOY OF LEAVING:

“Diane Wahto has been durably and diligently tilling the poetry fields here in Kansas for quite a while and her first harvest, The Sad Joy of Leaving, is finally gathered in. Title after title here, (“At the Lake,” “When Spring Comes,” “My Mother Ironing,” “At the Truck Stop in Pittsburg, Kansas”) lead into poems that remind us of the attempt to make the tight focus of dailiness expand into the greater world in all of its messy fascination, as well as the otherworldliness that’s all around us. Of the mother in the ironing poem: “My Mother Ironing,” “She presses her mark / into each piece.” So does Wahto, into each poem.”

—Albert Goldbarth, winner of the National Book Critics Circle award for Saving Lives and Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology, the only poet to receive the honor two times. He also won the Mark Twain Award for Humorous Poetry, awarded by the Poetry Foundation in 2008.