Daneen Wardrop is a Professor of English at Western Michigan University. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Antioch Review, Northwest Review, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Memorial Award; the Bentley Prize for Poetry from Seattle Review; and two Pushcart prize nominations. She is also the author of two books of literary criticism, including Emily Dickinson's Gothic (University of Iowa Press). This is her first book of poems.

Books by Daneen Wardrop: The Odds of Being, Word, Birth, and Culture: The Poetry of Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson, Emily Dickinson's Gothic: Goblin with a Gauge

Other poems on the web by Daneen Wardrop:
Two poems
"After Tear Down"

About The Odds of Being:

"The Odds of Being is an original; nobody writes like this, and Daneen Wardrop's poems seem to come from a quiet and loving necessity. Among other things, this book is a moving meditation of delight in a new daughter. And as a happy side effect, reading these poems changes the way your mind hears words, sees landscapes, reflects on history; it is a wonderful flowering." —Jean Valentine

"The subtle complexity of emotion in these poems arises from the planes of consciousness that Wardrop evokes, fragments, and then artfully reconstructs before our eyes into a new interrelatedness that would have been otherwise invisible. The Odds of Being is a mature and deeply satisfying first book."
—Stuart Dybek

"Daneen Wardrop has written a lovely book. Sensuous, flirting with the surreal, disjunctive in our era's mode, her poems still tell a story: of a mother going far from home to find a child, and bringing the child home, and loving her. Wardrop writes in stabs and flashes, at times violently, at times tenderly. Hers is a world in which `You could pick the house up/by the corners, wring it out.' It is also a world of utmost delicacy of perception, `as if a chrysanthemum, /deciding whether to unbloom, /would fold in on itself again in the way of unbelief.' How odd, and how true to being. How much to be grateful for."
—Rosanna Warren