Cold Comfort

Maggie Anderson is the author of several poetry collections including, Years That Answer, Windfall, and A Space Filled with Moving. She is the editor of Hill Daughter: New and Selected Poems of Louise McNeill, and co-editor of A Gathering of Poets, and Learning by Heart: Contemporary American Poetry about School. Anderson has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. She teaches creative writing at Kent State University where she directs the Wick Poetry Program and edits the Wick Poetry Series through the Kent State University Press.

I like Maggie Anderson's strong sense of place and the unsentimental attention she pays to her West Virginia origins. These are rooted poems. Even the vegetables' dreams rely on a vivid internal logic. As 'corn . . . the enormous yellow dirigible of August . . . dreams fair weather' and 'dill . . . drifts seeds onto cucumbers it schemes to marry,' I am beguiled.