“Rosemerry’s words help me feel the radical amazement of life—something I cherish and so often forget. These poems arise from a deep intimacy with the mystery we are part of; they nourish the heart and spirit.” — Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance
“With this collection, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer invites readers on an ‘un-journey’ of wonder. She beckons us to release our certainties and points toward the sacred in nature and neighbor. With each step along this poetic path, we discover that we truly belong both to this world and to one another. The way asks only that we notice, to be transformed. Everything belongs; everything, truly, to the wonderment. And what a wonder it is.” — Diana Butler Bass, author of A Beautiful Year
“The Wonderment is as sacred and vital a book as you will ever find. For years now, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer has shown us, through the daily balm of her poems, that wonder is not so much a practice, but a constant state of being that’s accessible to all of us in the messy and mundane, the gleeful and graceless moments of life. This new collection urges us to come as we are, with ‘empty, upturned hands,’ and to see that ‘opening them is the only way to hold light.’ The book you now hold in your hands is nothing less than a wise companion, here to light the way through every twist and turn of the human journey.” — James Crews, author of Breathing Room and The Sacred Everyday
“The Wonderment by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is a guide to the art of being lost and found, broken and whole, fierce and tender—inviting us to notice the presence of goodness and light at unexpected times and even the darkest places. It is a collection that feels like a quiet conversation with a very wise friend— offering a nudge, a grin and a graceful hand pointing toward impossible beauty in broken times. A story of survival, arrival and deep becoming, The Wonderment is a luminous work, an uncommon prayer and daily devotional for anyone learning to live with all that is—and all that is.” — Carrie Newcomer, musician, poet, and author of The Beautiful Not Yet and A Great Wild Mercy
“At a time when we wonder how to keep our spirits alive, here’s a collection of poems to open our hearts to the wonderment at the heart of life. It’s in everyday events that often pass unnoticed, and in moments so stunning we can hardly take them in. For me, Rosemerry Wahtola Tommer has become an essential poet. She helps me find my way through the challenges of our era and the losses that come with age. ‘It is difficult to get the news from poems,’ said William Carlos Williams, but people ‘die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.’ Even in the face of death, Trommer’s poetry sheds light and gives life, giving me new eyes for the grandeur of being alive. Come, take a look, and experience the joy of seeing your life and times anew.” — Parker J. Palmer, founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal and author of Let Your Life Speak, The Courage to Teach, and A Hidden Wholeness
“Meditative, elegiac, equal parts dark and light, unknowing and knowing, Trommer’s The Wonderment is pure gift to those who carry loss and pain, and to all of us searching out wonder even in the salt and ashes of the world. After unthinkable loss and ‘[a] tornado / of doubt [doing] its perfect work’ in the speaker of these poems, what remains? She seeks to cooperate with this night, to ‘lose what I thought I knew / of my story,’ to hear ‘what isn’t said back,’ and to intuit the paradox of ‘[w]hat impossible / sun shines inside the rough-skinned / bulb’ of amaryllis. She takes our hand to show us ‘how astonishing the dark,’ how rich and fertile, how each garden potato ‘pull[ed] from the earth is a small proof / of how things can grow in the dark.’ This tender, devastating book will wake you to dilation and reversal, to what is ‘most alive,’ and invite you to touch ‘[e]ven when it hurts / the holy.’” — Laura Reece Hogan, author of Butterfly Nebula
