Mother Lode

We are thrilled to announce our first publication of 2021: Peg Quinn, a multi-year finalist for the Spacks Prize, was selected for the first Gunpowder Editors’ Choice publication.

Peg Quinn’s poems in Mother Lode are songs that pull you “like a sturdy hand toward the dance floor” that is her life. They embrace the earthiness of Nebraska fields where her childhood is “planted,” the holiness of nature where a barn is a “cathedral,” the ocean a place of “worship,” and death in its sorrow or horror, a “reckoning.” She writes with a grace and voice uniquely hers. I found myself bowing after each poem.

—Perie Longo, Santa Barbara Poet Laureate Emerita

Peg Quinn’s book is an eyes-wide-open and sometimes humorous look at the Heartland, our Heartland. Mother Lode is a book of compassion. Quinn’s poems speak simply of life with a gracious eye. These beautifully crafted poems are meditations, prayers, psalms to the place we all live.

—Phil Taggart, Ventura Poet Laureate Emeritus

In this stunning collection, Peg Quinn has her feet firmly planted in two worlds: The rural Nebraska of her youth, and the California coastline. She evokes farm folks in their stride—covered in dirt, sweat and flour, playing at the river, gathering at the graveyard. She paints them with wry humor and deep affection.

—Enid Osborn, author of When the Big Wind Comes

Peg Quinn brings the visual acuity of a fine painter to the poems of her debut collection. Her depictions of life often elicit a familiar echo and a sense of wonder in our experience of a world we look at everyday and most often don’t see.These are fine poems from the very heart of things.

—Dan Gerber,  author of Particles: New and Selected Poems