Mary Junge’s poetry draws simplicity close then sets it out, like an overgrown hibiscus, to die. Unexpectedly, it flowers in the cold, a flamboyant red kiss. This is the story within the poem “Persuasion,” but she doesn?t tell us in what direction the persuasion works, and we are left, not knowing if the plant won a reprieve--only that it made one raw and beautiful flower.

Junge’s new book from the Laurel Poetry Collective takes its title Pilgrim Eye from a poem about American artist Georgia O’Keeffe. Though she insists that she writes from daily life--whatever crosses the path from her Eden Prairie home--many of her poems work their way into art with startling results:

the poem begins. The opening abstraction well represents O’Keeffe’s wind-swept images, but the “final cradles” rock with this author’s signature search for “something good within the struggle.” The poem leads us to O’Keeffe’s “pilgrim eye,” and a little later to her “bulging/sack of colors.” But the poem’s heart is surely the cradle rocking between birth and death.

In family poems, Junge returns to her Fargo/Moorhead childhood, to her father’s inability to make a go of the appliance store his father started, and to the “small knot of pity” she grew for him:

“Knowing finally how he must weave among the appliances
Each dull morning--each dull afternoon...”

This dull, dusty white is transformed in “White Weasel,” into prairie snow and a child making snow angels, which will soon be erased in a new dusting. The quiet obliteration hints at what is loved and feared about our prairie winters, the mysterious sundogs heralding the knowledge that one could die.

Another mystery haunting Junge’s poetry is her sister’s mental illness. The poem “Early Signs” lists with a child’s flat acceptance the sister’s increasing refusals--to comb, to wash.

 “Only the flames spoke to her
or the rhythm of waves lapping.”

Junge’s struggle to move into the world unencumbered--sneaking off without her sister to buy penny candy--permeates the poetry she writes about her own children. Setting her son on a plane to Poland, she retreats to her sister’s front stoop; the sister, “nearly fifty, [who] has never left the country.” The simple and inevitable grief of letting a child go is shadowed:

Why, I wonder, can’t a moment remain simple...
Without drawing out the shadows of the past?

We are the recipients of Junge’s tender, poignant answers, open to uncertainty but flowering with breath-taking suddenness. Her work comes with publishing credentials from Loonfeather, Minnesota Poetry Calendars, Sidewalks, Water~Stone, and The Wolf Head Quarterly among others.  The poem, “Demerol Dreams” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Express Train, a chapbook, was published by Pudding House Publications in 2002. She has benefited from writing residencies at Norcroft, Minnesota and Ragdale, Illinois.