Wendy Battin

On the Life & Work of an American Master

Published in 2020
ISBN: 978-1734435603
248 pages

“In this latest volume of the Unsung Masters series, the editors present a generous selection of Battin’s visionary poems, rich in imagery and written with a naturalist’s precision; included, too, are several essays of elegy and remembrance by those who knew and admired her deeply. Whatever the puzzles of her life, Wendy Battin has left us poems that are luminous and lasting, and this marvelous compendium amply demonstrates why so many regard her as one of the most gifted poets of her generation.”

—Ned Balbo

“As you read the life and work of Wendy Battin, you may find yourself asking why she wasn’t more well-known, especially after the auspicious beginning of her career. Here are poems of the inner life and outward perceptions of a clear-eyed observer at work; poems whose sounds vibrate like bells, whose sense radiates, simultaneously, through our consciousness like rainwater hitting the surface of a lake.”

—Kate Rushin

“One of the things I admire most about the poems of Wendy Battin is the strong sense of community, community with the natural world, with geology and geography, with animals and flowers, with the mythic past and women of mythology, with language and fellow poets, with the signs of the stars, with oxygen and alchemy, with many inspired voices, and the wounded among us. Her poems are acts of discovery, often self-discovery, unsparing in both candor and affection.”

—Robert Morgan

Edited by

Charles Hartman

Charles Hartman has published many books of poetry and criticism, most recently Verse: An Introduction to Prosody and a New & Selected Poems. He is Lucy Marsh Haskell Professor of English at Connecticut College.

Martha Collins

Martha Collins is the author of ten poetry collections, most recently Because What Else Could I Do, which won the William Carlos Williams Award. She has co-edited Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries and Catherine Breese Davis: On the Life & Work of an American Master. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Pamela Alexander

Pamela Alexander is the author of four collections of poems: Navigable Waterways, Commonwealth of Wings, Inland, and Slow Fire. She taught for many years at MIT and Oberlin College.

Matthew Krajniak

Matthew Krajniak is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston. His work appears in The Avalon Literary Review, Origins Journal, The Wax Paper, and elsewhere.