The Magician's Wife

Journalist, artist, student of spirituality – Charan Sue Wollard, like Walt Whitman, contains multitudes. Her poems flow from whatever her eye falls on: a bicycle tour, a peach on the windowsill, a legless beggar in India, a beetle, a child who will not speak. Wollard, former poet laureate of Livermore, California, has a rare gift for telling stories with power and insight. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., unfolds from the perspective of a 17-year-old tending counter in a drugstore. A gaspipe explosion is recounted in what remains: a bowl of carrots, a broken clock, an unread newspaper. In other poems she captures the extraordinary behind the ordinary, the “small kindnesses … that separate any of us / from inconsequence,” the poet struck silent by the “loud clap of nothing / the thunderous void.” Perhaps Wollard’s “theory of everything” best describes her approach to her work: “eyes open / to every / impossibility.” – Sally Zakariya, author of Personal Astronomy and When You Escape