Joanne Epp

Cattail Skyline

Joanne Epp’s second poetry collection “celebrates the tiny marvels and shifting layers of the Prairie landscape.” As a meditation on nature and place, it offers close-ups on particular landscapes – Omand’s Creek in Winnipeg; Star Lake in the boreal forest; a certain stretch of prairie road. By discovering a place for the first time, or finding the new within the familiar, or revisiting once-familiar places after many years, Epp questions how we know a place, how our perception of it changes, and what is impossible to know.

Eigenheim

Home is like “a memory of a lost photograph,” elusive but vivid. A place of tenuous security, “one claw on the screen” can threaten the entire structure. Joanne Epp, in her first collection of poetry, Eigenheim, shapes and reshapes the peculiar characteristics of one’s own idea of home.

Without defining the precise dimensions, there is room enough to house the essentials. Examining death and birth, loss and love, deep searching and unquenchable longing, Epp reaches back to her rural Mennonite roots while restlessly exploring what lies just beyond the sun’s reach.