Wal-Mart Orchid by Judith Sornberger

Winner of the 2011 Helen Kay Chapbook Poetry Prize

Wal-Mart Orchid by Judith Sornberger

Cover photo by Judith Sornberger

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If only we could—can we?—connect to one another and to the world we’ve been given as these poems connect, then
“the brief campfire of our laughter could call others who are…trying to find their way by knife-glint through our cities, to create a tribe and language out of gunshot and graffiti.” –Marjorie Saiser, author of Beside You at the Stoplight (Little Bluestem Award) and Rooms

Sornberger writes with grace and tenderness of the many things that divide us, such as class, gender, and education, and the small things that bring us together. . . of the empathy that is possible in the fragile moments when our lives intersect, even against the depersonalizing backdrop of commercial monoliths like Wal-Mart. –Louise A. Blum, author of Amnesty and You’re Not From Around Here, Are You?

In beautifully lyrical language, infused with clarity and insight, Sornberger takes us inside this most American phenomenon, reminding us that we are all connected, perhaps most deeply when we imagine ourselves apart. These are poems the world needs. –Alison Townsend, author of Persephone in America

The speaker patrols a daily life of frustration, conflict, casual hostilities and ever-mounting culpability, but she refuses despair. . . and continue(s) her necessary mission: “to keep seeing what cannot be / and spreading its gospel.” –Gaylord Brewer author of The Martini Diet and Give Over, Graymalkin.

Read poem: By the Time I Got to California  98 from Evening Street Review, NUMBER 5, Autumn 2011

Read  poem: Beneath the Sugar Maple, Late October   93 from Evening Street Review, NUMBER 12, Spring 2015