Thunderhead

The lyric poems in Daye Phillippo's radiant debut collection Thunderhead explore faith, motherhood, family, and community. As the author has put it, she has lived her life "backwards," first raising a large family, then going back to school, and only now seeing her work find its way into print. Rooted in Midwestern farm country near where she grew up, these place-based poems reflect a spiritual practice: searching for--and expecting to find--the sacred in the ordinary world of trees and weeds and seasons. Here you will find red-rooted pigweed and red-wing blackbirds, cornfields, woods, streams, gardens, and the creatures (human and otherwise) who inhabit them, in addition to a wide night sky filled with stars, and the ancient underground river, the Teays, that throbs and flows beneath them all. During a thunderstorm, Phillippo wonders: "what if, / in choosing words to ponder we choose / our countenance, too?" The poems in this collection offer us not only a compelling self-portrait, but a mirror in which we may better see who we are and might become.