Mark Wagenaar is the author of The Body Distances (A Hundred Blackbirds Rising) (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016). He is the 2014 winner of the Pinch Poetry Award, the New Letters Poetry Prize, and the Mary C. Mohr Poetry Prize, as well as the 2013 winner of the James Wright Poetry Prize, the Poetry International Prize, and the Yellowwood Poetry Prize. Wagenaar?s poems have been published or accepted by 32 Poems, Field, Image, The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, Subtropics, and Washington Square. He teaches at Valparaiso University and lives in Valparaiso, Indiana.

Other poems by Mark Wagenaar in Verse Daily:
July 5, 2018:   "Heat Wave (Poem for Novica Tadic Perhaps)" "It was so hot people were unzipping..."
October 26, 2012:   "Carnival Nocturne" "Peanut shells crackle beneath your pink slippers..."

Books by Mark Wagenaar:

Other poems on the web by Mark Wagenaar:
Three poems
Three poems
"Poem for Max Ritvo, Perhaps"
"Ghost Hour Gospel"
Three poems
"Winter Song"
"Goat Hour Gospel (Such Salvage)"
"North"
"Me & the Devil Blues"

Mark Wagenaar's Website.

Mark Wagenaar on Twitter.

About Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining:

"'Language is the fire that survives us' Mark Wagenaar writes, and we are seared gladly by his brilliant flames. A pilgrim in the 'Christ-haunted South,' as Flannery O'Connor describes it, these poems reckon with the sins of history and the human-made scars on the natural world. The songs of Charles Wright, Rilke, and Blind Willie Johnson have tuned Wagenaar's ear, but the music is his own, irresistibly so. SOUTHERN TONGUES LEAVE US SHINING is a brave and difficult grappling, ending with the difficult joy of a child's birth and the world's subsequent remaking. This is, simply put, poetry that adds to the glory of the human endeavor."
—Beth Ann Fennelly

"In SOUTHERN TONGUES LEAVE US SHINING, there is a rapturous beauty that encompasses the American South, the United States, and the world, a poetic rooted in the space around the poet and extending outward to the world with questioning, compassion, grief, and hope. The lines have an aching eloquence bustling with a truer Southern verve, one recognizable by those who know it and appreciable by those who have yet to know it. THere are many lines in this collection that take me up in a swoop and carry me along the terrain of now and never."
—Afaa M. Weaver