Gladiola Girls by Marion Wrenn

This is a Pre-Order! New Release coming in June of 2025!!

Gladiola Girls by Marion Wrenn
ISBN-13: 978-1-943899-22-7
Paperback, 79 pages
First Edition, 2025
$15.00 + t/s/h

From the back of the book:
Like the angel of history with the past piled up at her feet, Marion Wrenn gathers that debris to build engines of memory gassed up by time’s promise to heal the heart. The result is her debut collection  Gladiola Girls , poems that coax beauty from the everyday while every day sets the stage for devastation. With lyric intensity and endearing wit, these poems move with the ferocity of forgiveness rescinded in order to savor the grace of forgiving again.

—Gregory Pardlo

Everyone, at some point in their lives, should be loved by a poet named Marion. To be claimed with as much ferocity as Marion Wrenn claims her people in  Gladiola Girls. Ask Mama Wrenn, her sis, and the acquiescing cats ready for cross-country transport. Ask the gods who took her elders, her exes and friends. Ask the flowers with odd names, ask strangers why people die on planes, why fly-fishing isn't harmless. Ask Mr. Burr, apartment cucumber farmer, how love can be good, even wild. Ask for Marion the poet, ask her how/why she writes about Skippy jars and Heinz Ketchup. Or ask yourself whether there's such a thing as firecracker breeze, because Marion has invented it. Because her work hisses and spits and sings and twirls, because she has paid attention to the many shitfucks her world has collided with and she has spun them into stories/thoughts we invented fireplaces for. This is prose with smoke, this is joy with heat, this is grief with teeth. This, Marion reminds us, is life!

—Deepak Unnikrishnan

Marion Wrenn’s bright diamond of a debut,  Gladiolas Girls  is a multifaceted exploration of grief, each polished surface refracting some new and unexpected facet of how we live with loss. Wrenn’s voice is by turns tender, jocular, and ribald, but her gentleness carries us through each poem with a care that lets us look at pains too searing to see in any other way. Make no mistake: the arcs of life in this book are joyous. We all know that there is no grief without loss, but Wrenn reminds us that there is no grief without love.

—Jason Schneiderman

Marion Wrenn is the Executive Director of Writing at NYU Abu Dhabi. Recent poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, River Heron Review, and The Georgia Review. She co-edits the literary journal Painted Bride Quarterly (pbq.drexel.edu) where she also co-hosts and produces the literary podcast The Slush Pile. She has taught writing at NYU, Parsons, and the Princeton Writing Program.