Both Shoes Off: Poems - Softcover

I love Jeanne Bryner's poetry for the way it pulls me out of being lost in relentless abstract thinking and returns me to the real world of nature and people who know how to live and work in it. Jeanne sees and feels the actual world and also meanings and metaphors, and then shares her vision and her feelings in language that for me brings the word "health" to mind and then becomes: love, of the most generous kind. Love, strength and beauty radiate from Jeanne's poems as, indeed, they do from herself, personally. -Gurney Norman, Kentucky writer

Bryner's grasp of the harsh demands and simple satisfactions of rural life make for truly compelling poetry. Her honest and well-crafted testimonies remind us oft from the 'gat it takes to get through life, the kind of quieter life in which many Americans still live and work, a life far removed from the more sensationally reality of sound bites and headlines. It is a privilege to have been let inside so many tender moments of everyday domesticity as are revealed in these finely measured poems. -Marc Harshman, poet laureate of West Virginia / /

With a good reporter's precision and a gifted poets empathy, Jeanne Bryner's latest book focuses on 'the epic of everyday life.' Here, she recreates the story of her husband, her children, the roof and doors of her house, un unpredictably garden, and her farmer neighbor's crops and cattle....Both Shoes Off is a true gift from a wise and accomplished poet, straight from the 'good bones church' of her remarkable life. -Maggie Anderson, author of Windfall: New and Selected Poems

Bryner's grasp of the harsh demands and simple satisfactions of rural life make for truly compelling poetry. Her honest and well-crafted testimonies remind us oft from the 'gat it takes to get through life, the kind of quieter life in which many Americans still live and work, a life far removed from the more sensationally reality of sound bites and headlines. It is a privilege to have been let inside so many tender moments of everyday domesticity as are revealed in these finely measured poems. -Marc Harshman, poet laureate of West Virginia / /

With a good reporter's precision and a gifted poets empathy, Jeanne Bryner's latest book focuses on 'the epic of everyday life.' Here, she recreates the story of her husband, her children, the roof and doors of her house, un unpredictably garden, and her farmer neighbor's crops and cattle. ...Both Shoes Off is a true gift from a wise and accomplished poet, straight from the 'good bones church' of her remarkable life. -Maggie Anderson, author of Windfall: New and Selected Poems