Beautiful Machinery

Wendy DeGroat's Beautiful Machinery is a fine collection of intelligent, witty and moving poetry. She is direct without ever being simple. Her ear is excellent and she creates webs of sound. She writes love poems that are sensual and never sentimental. These poems bring you in contact with someone you want to know.
-Marge Piercy, award-winning author of a memoir, 17 novels, and 19 books of poetry, most recently Made in Detroit

Reading Wendy DeGroat's poetry makes me think of the phrase, "daily bread." Precise imagery, the joy of internal rhymes, and the light touch of formality are abundant in these poems. Attuned to the music of spoken word, DeGroat's lyricism and her sense of connection to the natural world, to the "beautiful machinery" of the beloved's body, provide substance and sustenance for the heart, for the imagination.
-Janice Gould, author of Doubters and Dreamers, and the forthcoming chapbook, The Force of Gratitude

Wendy DeGroat's Beautiful Machinery draws its title from "Running Late," a playful and beautifully wrought poem about the body's wonders, yet the book maps not just the body. It expands to cover the difficult territory of marriage, divorce, sexuality, feminism, and new love-all with the same tender honesty of the title poem. In "Ode to Spiders" she writes, "Webs etch-a-sketched across the deck, / watch them cast lines, ride the wind." DeGroat has etch-a-sketched her own lines across traditional themes-and they merit your careful attention.
-Sierra Golden, author of Aristotle's Lantern

The female body, that "beautiful machinery," is Wendy DeGroat's subject. It is the "lit wick flaring" or the tingle of taut nipples that makes it so "hard/to get ready for work." In language luscious and liquid, these poems invite the reader to join her in wonder and praise.
-Kim Roberts, Co-Editor, Beltway Poetry Quarterly