In her new collection, Earth, Mercy, Mary Rose O’Reilley sifts through the debris of human habitation—pink thong sandals, curlers, broken televisions—looking for a kind of junkyard grace: “Holiness enters again / turquoise fins, and the Cessna’s carapace / lifts on its wind.”
Mary Rose O’Reilley’s first book of poetry, Half Wild, won the 2005 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of Modern Poets. Her five essay collections are grounded in her life as a teacher, potter, musician, Quaker minister, Buddhist novice, and farm worker. She lives in Minnesota, where she tends to animals and organic gardens.
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