This image is the cover for the book Willow Room, Green Door

Willow Room, Green Door

The author of Good Heart presents “lyric poetry that sings, enchants, debunks and then reconstructs the truths and mysteries of our lives” (Jim Moore, author of Prognosis).

Winner of the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry

Included in the Book Sense Picks Poetry Top Ten

Written over the course of three decades, this extraordinary collection of new and selected poems presents a body of work from Deborah Keenan that is expressive variously of love and rage, vulnerability and authority, distraction and focus, and, perhaps above all, a sharply empathetic sense of observation. Keenan’s work balances holding on to what is dear with letting go of what she cannot change.

With refreshing curiosity, these poems capture rich layers of life in trial and bliss alike, enabling us to see what a number of her contemporaries have recognized for some time: Deborah Keenan is one of our great poets.

“My god, these are beautiful poems. I feel as if a great soul is speaking in these poems, after long thought and meditation and inward dialogue.” —Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love

Deborah Keenan

Deborah Keenan is the author of six collections of poetry and has been published in over fifty literary magazines and anthologies. A regular contributor to Water~Stone Review, founder of the Laurel Poetry Collective, teacher and mentor at the Loft Literary Center, Keenan has always made an effort to connect with the community and bring art into the lives of those who may otherwise have been without. A Professor at the Graduate School at Hamline University where Keenan has been honored with the Hamline University award for professor of the year three times. This year (2006-2007) Keenan will be holding the Edelstein-Keller chair, a position reserved to help bring distinguished Minnesotan authors to the University of Minnesota. Keenan is a mother of four children and lives with her husband, head of Urban Programs for Habitat for Humanity International, in St. Paul.

Milkweed Editions