BOOKS & PRESS | haydensaunier

Hayden Saunier’s A Cartography of Home is another breathtaking example of what this poet does best: crafting sensuous language, weaving together word play and close observation.

--Philadelphia Stories

Saunier’s clear-sighted vision is perhaps the tonic we need for a healthier world. --Pedestal Magazine

"These beautiful poems create a heightened awareness of how all things are connected. From the people who came before us, whether they built our physical house or built our family, to the natural world—dirt, sky, sun, moon, trees, coyotes, seasons, horses, fruit, flowers. It is all there for the taking; we have only to look for it."

--The Compulsive Reader

Why read poems in the midst of a pandemic? I go to poetry for a naked view of humankind: our cruelties, our quirks and kindness, our capacity for change. That’s here, in all the homes Saunier inhabits. The first piece invites the reader to join her at a table made of salvaged wood, “spalted through with hard luck, grease/disease, fat streaks of amber jam/…Sit down and eat.” Say yes. You’ll be well fed. -The Broad Street Review

These are poems that demand to be reread, not because there is anything difficult or obscure about them, but because, like gemstones in just the right light at just the right angle, they sparkle so magically.

-The Philadelphia Inquirer

...the poems’ serious contemplation of mortality and wilderness binds them together and makes them as important as any you’ll read this year.

-Broad Street Review

The interconnectedness of everything on earth, how we belong to it all, how permeable boundaries are between us and the natural world, how things sing and what they sing of are rendered with aching acuity. Whether a poem’s focus shines on a “rump sprung sofa,” a turkey vulture, or dazzling autumn trees described as “sugar maple drama queens,” even evanescence becomes rich and luminous in these poems. This is a gorgeous, precise and deeply graceful collection.

--Amy Gerstler

“Hayden Saunier is a poet of wit, irony, and a huge generosity of heart. Her voice is wise, deep, and resonant with wonder variations in tone, technique, and an attention to the line that gives her poems the sort of full and memorable body you hope for when you open a new wine that carried a curious and somewhat haunting label.”

--Laure-Anne Bosselaar, from the Foreword, SAY LUCK

“In these lucid and intriguing elegies, at the cold heart of calamity, there is a calm. This calm, a kind of wisdom, does not so much console as teach us that in the face the tragic one cannot help, at least for some time, to remain inconsolable. You will find, in spite of what I have just said, that these poems are funny and humane, sharpened by Saunier’s razor-edged wit. She tunes these poems with a keen ear and perfected pitch for the music of the American language. This is a breathtaking and stunning debut.”

--Eric Pankey