Praise for For What Is, Praise: New & Selected Poems

For What Is, Praise: New & Selected Poems is here to remind us that Ann Fisher-Wirth has been quietly writing some of our country’s best poetry for decades. At last, we have it under one cover—a richly lived life, full of intensity and yearning. What a wealth of experience: a girlhood in the California of the 60s, an acting role in a Tennessee Williams play that summons difficult memories, a year in Sweden guided by an ancient map, an annulment questionnaire that must be completed to appease a first husband, the abiding love of a second husband, the soul-affirming teaching experience with the incarcerated men of Parchman Penitentiary, a cherished sister lost to cancer. Fisher-Wirth’s reputation as a deeply invested and nuanced observer of the natural world is everywhere affirmed. Her imagery is lush and teaming with life as she evokes setting, most often “Mississippi, where at night / the vast trees throb with the cicadas’ silver music.” For What Is, Praise deserves both our praise and our astonished gratitude.

―Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi (2016-2021) and author of The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs

Ann Fisher-Wirth is an extraordinary poet of abundant insight and music. This new and selected volume is a substantial presence of such intense and tender poems. An immense work of beauty and heart that gives us the true scope of this significant American poet of southern and universal sensibilities. For What Is, Praise is a remarkable gathering of her finest work yet. Here is a gem whose voice we should all know and treasure.

―Saddiq Dzukogi, author of Bakandamiya: An Elegy and Your Crib, My Qibla, winner of the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry

Across more than two decades of work, Ann Fisher-Wirth has created a body of poetry that deepens with each book, returning to the essential questions of love, family, grief, memory, and the sustaining power of place. For What Is, Praise reveals a poet unafraid to follow experience wherever it leads, from childhood and marriage to motherhood, aging, illness, and the natural world that continually offers both witness and renewal. These poems move with remarkable emotional range, embracing vulnerability without sentimentality and wisdom without certainty. As Fisher-Wirth writes, "Why not knock at the door and say 'I am yours. I am here'?" That longing for connection becomes the throughline of this generous collection, one that gathers a lifetime of looking closely and loving fiercely. For What Is, Praise is both a summation and a continuation, reminding us that poetry can illuminate not only what has been lost, but what still asks to be cherished.

―January Gill O'Neil, author of Glitter Road