One Needful Song casts spells of transformation: the tongues of songbirds turned out in delicate and sweet spice, the hearth of the home becoming the heart of the home, the roof of scorched Notre Dame healing beneath its tarp. There is such a sense of hope and renewal in these ecopoetic elegies, in which bee, blossom, and bird are restored, family and strangers alike are redeemed, and though there are storms, there is also a dream of outlasting them. This book is a kind of miracle.

—D. A. Powell

This is a rare creation of song and scar, of vulnerability and both emotional and structural complexity. In Jeanne Wagner’s new collection, One Needful Song, the outer and inner, conceptual and human worlds mingle in accessible yet complex ways. Brimming with meditations on history and myth, family and nostalgia, landscape and personal identity, these vibrant poems remain grounded in a universal familiarity that opens us up to something greater. If one of the aims of poetry is to condense our vast, contradictory, and beautifully human world into the briefest of songs, One Needful Song, being both intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging, stands as a testament to its possibility.

—   John Sibley Williams

One Needful Song casts memory and imagination as dream—a mother lifting an ironed shirt “warm as a new-laid egg”—and plumbs the astonishing . . . a pregnant woman covering her belly with bees. Here is celebration and lament in equal measure. These poems/songs—deeply needed by us all—call to mind how the Romans supposedly “cut out the tongues of the larks, coated them with honey and spice, devoured them like edible songs.” This collection, too, will be devoured.

                                                                                               —Doug Ramspeck

Jeanne Wagner is the author of four chapbooks and three full-length collections: The Zen Piano Mover, which won the NFSPS Poetry Prize; In the Body of Our Lives, published by Sixteen Rivers Press; and Everything Turns Into Something Else, published in 2020 as runner-up in the Grayson Books Poetry Contest. Her more recent awards include the Joy Harjo Poetry Award, First Prize in the Naugatuck Narrative Poetry Contest, and winning the Cloudbank Books Contest. Her work has appeared in North American Review, The Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, and The Southern Review. A retired tax accountant, she lives in Kensington, California.