"...a tapestry of love, loss, grief, and acceptance"

Regie Gibson

Photo credit: Debi Milligan, 2022

About Wendy

A recipient of a 2022 artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Wendy's fourth collection, Notes from the Column of Memory, will be published by Terrapin Books in 2022. Her third poetry collection, Before There Was Before, was published by Iris Press in 2017. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, J Journal, Lily Poetry Review, Nimrod, Pangyrus, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, South Florida Poetry Review, Sugar House, The Atlanta Review, The Mid-American Review, The Hudson Review, The Threepenny Review, and the Valparaiso Poetry Review, among others. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily and WBUR's Cognoscenti; and in numerous anthologies. She's been the poet in residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, since 2018, and is programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club.

Praise

“This is one of the most moving offerings of poetry I have read in a long time.”

Regie Gibson, Storms Beneath the Skin

“In Wendy Drexler’s new book, the vividly remembered past and the carefully observed present are on intimate terms, constantly informing each other.”

Martha Collins, Casualty Reports: Poems

“Wendy Drexler’s Notes from the Columns of Memory is a master class in perception.”

Donika Kelly, The Renunciations: Poems

“With a remarkable sureness of touch that comes from knowing the contours of words, [Wendy Drexler] renders what being is.”

Jennifer Barber, editor of Salamander; Works on Paper

“Serious, playful, reverential, staccato, elegiac, timely, historical— and deeply personal—and all of it written in dark, light, and color.”

John Hanson Mitchell, author of An Eden of Sorts: A Natural History of My Feral Garden

“Wendy Drexler’s Before There Was Before is that rare book that both ranges far, into the worlds of science, nature and art, and moves in close, examining her own particular human experience.”

Wendy Mnookin, author of Dinner with Emerson

Featured Poem

“Apology to My Ovaries”

https://www.swwim.org/

Read More

Featured Video

Latest Blog Post

Werner’s Nemenclature of Colours: An Inspiration

I’d forgotten about it, this slim volume, until the spine on my bookshelf caught my eye: Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, whose title extends, in that florid 19th century way, to Adapted to Zoology, Botany, Chemistry, Mineralogy, Anatomy, and the Arts. First published in 1814 and in a second edition in 1821, Werner’s Nomenclature is one…

Read More