Jeanne Wagner is the author of four chapbooks and four full-length collections, most recently, One Needful Song, winner of the 2024 Catamaran Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Alaska Review, Cincinnati Review, North American Review, Southern Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily and Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry.

Other poems by Jeanne Wagner in Verse Daily:
November 12, 2023:   "In Praise of Echo" "Ovid made her into just another ditzy naiad condemned..."
March 21, 2021:   "Dogs That Look Like Wolves" "When my dog hears the neighbor's baby cry, he begins..."
October 5, 2020:   "We Were Sirens" "Like all hybrids, we were liminal; we were..."
April 3, 2004:  "The Bibliophile" "His bedroom in shocking disarray..."

Other poems on the web by Jeanne Wagner:
Three poems
"Witnessing"
Two poems
"My mother was like the bees"
Five poems
Two poems
Two poems
Three poems
"Summer Interior"
"Graphology"
Two poems
"Voyeurs"

Jeanne Wagner's Website.

About One Needful Song:

"One Needful Song casts spells of transformation: the tongues of songbirds turned out in delicate and sweet spice, the hearth of the home becoming the heart of the home, the roof of scorched Notre Dame healing beneath its tarp. There is such a sense of hope and renewal in these ecopoetic elegies in which bees, blossom and bird are restored, family and strangers alike are redeemed, and though there are storms there is also a dream of outlasting it. This book is a kind of miracle."
—D. A. Powell

"This is a rare creation of song and scar, of vulnerability and both emotional and structural complexity. In Jeanne Wagner's new collection One Needful Song, the outer and inner, conceptual and human worlds mingle in accessible yet complex ways. Brimming with meditations on history and myth, family and nostalgia, landscape and personal identity, these vibrant poems remain grounded in a universal familiarity that opens us up to something greater. If one of the aims of poetry is to condense our vast, contradictory, and beautifully human world into the briefest of songs, One Needful Song, being both intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging, stands as a testament to its possibility."
—John Sibley Williams

"One Needful Song casts memory and imagination as dream—a mother lifting an ironed shirt 'warm as a new laid egg'—and plumbs the astonishing . . . a pregnant woman covering her belly with bees. Here is celebration and lament in equal measure. These poems/songs—deeply needed by us all—call to mind how the Romans supposedly 'cut out the tongues of the larks, coated them with honey and spice, devoured them like edible songs.' This collection, too, will be devoured."
—Doug Ramspeck