Overview

Love Garden at the End of the World by Christine Stephens-Krieger is a debut poetry collection steeped in the landscapes of Michigan's dunes, lakes, and gardens-and in the intimate terrain of love, loss, and transformation. Stephens-Krieger's poems traverse childhood and motherhood, sensuality and grief, often with a feminist lens and a fierce embrace of life's contradictions. Praised by poets Dan Gerber, Patricia Clark, Lee Upton, Neil Kaufman, and Nancy Eimers, the collection blends vivid natural imagery with human vulnerability: violets and clavicles, storms and tenderness, intimacy and independence. From elegies for her father to love poems for her husband, from meditations on the body's changes to the persistence of joy, these poems celebrate both the fleeting and the eternal. Stephens-Krieger's voice is rooted in place but expansive in reach, carrying readers from quiet Michigan gardens to the vastness of emotional and spiritual landscapes. Love Garden at the End of the World is both an ode to the natural world and an invitation to dwell fully in our own humanity.

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9781968226022

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Reviews

""There is talent and energy here, and hard-earned truth. Christine Stephens-Krieger's poems are exuberant and effusive in their physicality, a celebration of childhood, motherhood, of violets and clavicles, heartache and joy, the human, animal/vegetable surrealism of everyday life."" -Dan Gerber, of Sailing through Cassiopeia and A Primer on Parallel Lives ""Christine Stephens-Krieger's debut volume of poetry Love Garden at the End of the World is a richly mythic, sensual and feminist exploration of womanhood. Readers will recognize and thrill with the West Michigan landscape and with lush descriptions of the natural world. The whole book is steeped in the landscape of Michigan's dunes and lakes. There are many pleasures for readers-especially Christine Stephens-Krieger's wide open stance embracing life, adventure, and especially love and relationships. Her writing is best when it surprises us, as with a line like 'Time is a grenade in the chest / with the pin pulled at birth.' This is a book of becoming, of growing, just like gardens grow. Some of the most memorable poems here are ones about her father, several love poems, and others that wrestle with the concept of death, especially 'The Art of Death' and a late one in the volume called 'Last Will and Testament.' I look forward to the path of Christine Stephens-Krieger's poetry in the future and am confident other readers will want to follow her as well."" -Patricia Clark, author O Lucky Day and Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars ""Christine Stephens-Krieger writes of a child's thrilling sense of the fullness of her being and of the beauty and power of mature love. In her nuanced, skillfully wrought, and compelling poems, she pays close attention to our daily common risks while vividly portraying creative mystery, adult vulnerability, and the paradoxes we live with: the 'secret no one knows / the same one everyone knows.'"" -Lee Upton, author of Wrongful and The Day Every Day Is ""This book is a miracle of poetics and a testament to what can be said when poetics truly, effectively, actually express the human heart's passion. I've learned more about love from reading this book, and there's no greater gift than that. It is so brave in its vulnerability. This book is a true gardener's guide for the greatest kind of thing we can grow as human beings. I can't wait 'til I can buy a copy and share these poems with others in my life. I feel blessed to have read them and I'm thankful for their light."" -Neil Kaufman, author of Jungle Gyms for Monkey Minds ""The poems of Christine Stephens-Krieger explore the little everything that makes up each passing moment, its nuance and flavors, blue slag glass retrieved from a lake, onion trucks and giant windmills, kids playing statues, tomatoes just off the vine. Lovers holding hands 'in a rainy cemetery.' The body going about its own mysterious changes. Nothing stands still; these poems honor and cherish how, on a daily basis, in grief and in love, we too keep on going: 'We're rich with cargo. We travel.'"" -Nancy Eimers, author of Oz, A Grammar to Waking, No Moon, and Destroying Angel

Author Information

Christine Stephens-Krieger (she/her) is the 8th Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan (2024-2027) and has been a vital presence in the city's poetry community since the 1990s. She coordinated the Dyer-Ives Poetry Competition for many years and created An Oral History of Poetry in Grand Rapids, now archived at the Grand Rapids Public Library. She co-leads The Grand River Poetry Collective, produces literary events, and is currently working on the documentary Poetry is Magic: The Power of Poetry in Grand Rapids. Stephens-Krieger holds a BA in English from Grand Valley State University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University. Her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies, and she has won both the Dyer-Ives Poetry Competition and the MacGuffin Michigan Poet Hunt. She teaches in the Frederik Meijer Honors College at GVSU and at Aquinas College, and lives in Grand Rapids with her husband, author and poet Scott Krieger, and several beloved cats.

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