Where Sweetness Falls With the Rain: Cookbook

Reading Margaret Coombs's new collection is like standing beside a waterfall, savoring the world and our human and more than human connections as if experiencing them for the first time. Many of the poems in Where Sweetness Falls with the Rain are love poems-about a marriage, the morning light, the river, the grackles, and pelicans. Other poems bear witness-to the loss of Wisconsin's ash trees and the curse of invasive plants-but also to Coombs's grandfather who served in the U.S. Navy and survived a submarine attack. Coombs's poems reassure us that the trees remember "the girl on the bicycle gliding through the woods." Inspiring awe, hope, and compassionate action, these poems are "a summer evening/underneath a pink-gold sky." They're the "seeds that will help us survive."
--Emilie Lindemann, author of mother-mailbox

BIO
Margaret Coombs has published numerous poems, most recently in the journals Mad Swirl, Writing in a Woman's Voice, Verse Virtual, and Sad Girls Club Blog. She is a contributing poet to Mad Swirl magazine and an editorial assistant at The Solitary Plover: The Newsletter of the Friends of Lorine Niedecker. She has published one chapbook under the name Peggy Turnbull with the title The Joy of Their Holiness (Kelsay Press). She earned a B.A. degree in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an M.L.I.S. at the University of Texas at Austin, and a G.A.C. in Library Management from the University of North Texas. She began writing a diary when she was 20 years old; it became a lifetime practice. After retiring from the University of Wisconsin Colleges and inspired by the landscape and history she lives near, she began to study, write, and publish poetry. Margaret and her husband Bob live in her hometown, Manitowoc, Wisconsin.