For decades a restorer of old homes, Connie Wanek shows us that poetry is everywhere, encountered as easily in the waterways, landscapes, and winters of Minnesota, as in the old roofs and darkened drawers of a home long uninhabited. Rival Gardens includes more than thirty unpublished poems, along with poems selected from three previous books.

Acknowledgments     Introduction by Ted Kooser     Selections from Bonfire April     Red Fox     Abstract     Wild Apples     The Girl and the Horses     Daylilies     The Wandering Sky     Broom     Skim Milk     Radish     Radiator     Missed Bus     Duluth, Minnesota     Blue Moon     The Gelding     Dragonfly     Rain     Toward Dusk     Peonies     Amaryllis     Christmas Tree     January     Bonfire     Ski Tracks     Selections from Hartley Field The Coin behind Your Ear     The Ventriloquist     Butter     Peaches     Red Rover     Jump Rope     Horses in Spring     Summer Night     Lemon     Long Nights     Postcard: Busy Clarence Town Harbor on a Mail Boat Day     Honesty     Black and White Photograph     Memorial Day at the Lake     The Midwife     The Exchange     Children near the Water     A Field of Barley     Checkers     So like Her Father     The Hammer     Tag     Late September     New Snow     Grown Children     Heart Surgery     All Saints’ Day     Christmas Fable     After Us     Hartley Field     Selections from On Speaking Terms First Snow     Monopoly     Nothing     Tracks in the Snow     The Accordion     Scrabble     Directions     Lipstick     Everything Free     Fishing on Isabella Lake     Garlic     Rags     Lady     Confessional Poem     Walking Distance     The Splits     Buttercups     Closest to the Sky     Comb     Umbrella     Picture Yourself     The Death of My Father     A Sighting     Green Tent     Pumpkin     A Random Gust from the North     Musical Chairs     A Parting     Pecans     Old Snow     Pickles     Coloring Book     Blue Ink     Six Months after My Father’s Death     Honey     Leftovers     Ice Out     New Poems Part One Garter Snake     Pollen     Rival Gardens     The Summerhouse     Polygamy     The Neighbor’s Pond     An Ordinary Crisis     Mysterious Neighbors     Catbird     Root Words     Rain Collection     Blue Flags     “Golden Glow”     Blackbirds at Dusk     First House     Last Star     Part Two Used Book     Ghost Town     When I Was a Boy     Audience     John Q. Public     A Collection of Near Misses     Adaptation     Plein Air     The Death of the Battery     Girdle     Parts per Million     Mrs. God     Genesis, Cont.     Day of Rest     Business     First Love     Part Three Artificial Tears     I Heard You Come In     Pavement Ends     The Shoes of the Dead     A Last Time for Everything     Practice     Phoebe     They Live with Us     Recalled to Life     Walleye     Wild Asters     Brave Rabbits     Brave Rabbits, a Second Look     A Marsh at Twilight     The Second Half of the Night     Cabbage Moth     Garden Gloves     Also by This Gardener