Press 53, 2026

Praise for For What Is, Praise: New and Selected Poems

Across more than two decades of work, Ann Fisher-Wirth has created a body of poetry that deepens with each book, returning to the essential questions of love, family, grief, memory, and the sustaining power of place. For What Is, Praise reveals a poet unafraid to follow experience wherever it leads, from childhood and marriage to motherhood, aging, illness, and the natural world that continually offers both witness and renewal. These poems move with remarkable emotional range, embracing vulnerability without sentimentality and wisdom without certainty. As Fisher-Wirth writes, “Why not knock at the door and say ‘I am yours. I am here’?” That longing for connection becomes the throughline of this generous collection, one that gathers a lifetime of looking closely and loving fiercely. For What Is, Praise is both a summation and a continuation, reminding us that poetry can illuminate not only what has been lost, but what still asks to be cherished.

*Quoted line from “Blue Window.”

January Gill O’Neil
Professor of English, Salem State University
AWP Board of Directors, 2015-2027
Former Executive Director, Massachusetts Poetry Festival, 2012-18

For What Is, Praise: New & Selected Poems is here to remind us that Ann Fisher-Wirth has been quietly writing some of our country’s best poetry for decades. At last, we have it under one cover—a richly-lived life, full of intensity and yearning. What a wealth of experience: a girlhood 

in the California of the 60s, an acting role in a Tennessee Williams play that summons difficult memories, a year in Sweden guided by an ancient map, an annulment questionnaire that must be completed to appease a first husband, the abiding love of a second husband, the soul-affirming teaching experience with the incarcerated men of Parchman Penitentiary, a cherished sister lost to cancer. Fisher-Wirth’s reputation as a deeply-invested and nuanced observer of the natural world is everywhere affirmed. Her imagery is lush and teeming with life as she evokes setting, most often “Mississippi, where at night / the vast trees throb with the cicadas’ silver music.” For What Is, Praise deserves both our praise and our astonished gratitude.

Beth Ann Fennelly
Poet Laureate of Mississippi 2016-2021, Author of The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs (W.W. Norton)