Wild Work, by Ellen L. Henning

Poetry, chapbook, 24 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Wild Work is a grief kaleidoscope, a rainbow, a reckoning. In this compact collection, Ellen L. Henning writes with a woman’s relish and a bold honesty almost brazen. Her work takes the reader to the edges of obliteration and creation, sharing visceral experiences—and their imagined underbelly—as a mother, daughter, and human being.

From the hospital’s family room to her father’s hospice bed, from a bar bathroom to Chicagoland’s Jewel Osco, from the kitchen to the dance floor to her daydreams—these poems map an unruly grief journey. Henning writes her way through, leaving behind a tenacious celebration of survival through birth, death, and loss. Wild Work asks about the afterlife, speculating on a myriad of saviors, while rooting us right back to the everyday. In a voice accessible and incendiary, Wild Work invites partaking parties to remember—if you are reading this, you are alive.

Ellen is a poet, speech-language pathologist, mother, and Midwestern artist. Her poems have appeared in Ars Sententia, Pearl Press, and Four Tulips, and were showcased with her multimedia collage work alongside her Sanctuary Poet peers at Side Street Gallery in Elgin, Illinois. She volunteers at her house of worship—the library—and hopes her son will forever live in a world where they still exist. Wild Work is her first published collection.