In her second poetry collection, Joanne Epp ventures from open prairie roads into little creek beds, down onto the warm earth of strawberry patches and far afield to the busy markets of Cambodia to examine the intimate ways we come to know and experience place. With vivid detail and a sense of quiet reverence, Cattail Skyline captures a myriad of landscapes where every change of season and slant of light reveals something previously unnoticed, and where even the most well- trodden paths hold the potential for new discovery.
Cattail Skyline is a love song en plein air for the prairies, full of painterly seeing. The narrator returns to the landscape of her childhood, taking inventory of the ways it shaped her. Why return to the path? / Where else would you go?
--Monica Kidd, Chance Encounters with Wild Animals
What a gift these poems are in these troubled times. Each walk down the cemetery road is stirring, each journey by train or back to childhood truly moving in every sense. Exquisite at every turn and hauntingly precise, Cattail Skyline quietly measures the electricity of place, the rhythms of life, and what it means to return and remember. I feel as if my heart has been heard.
--Brenda Schmidt, Culverts Beneath the Narrow Road