Hitchhikers to Eden

Jean Biegun's Hitchhikers to Eden takes me back to my own perfect place, on the Lake Michigan Shore where I grew up and where Jean honed her poet's eye and ear. Her writing transports me to places I once explored and shows me things I never before saw, heard, or felt. These are poems to be savored, one at a time, as the seasons change through the year. Jean's clear and remarkably accessible verse is sure to reach deep into the heart of anyone who knows and treasures the natural world, wherever their personal Eden may be.

-Ted J. Rulseh, author of A Lakeside Companion (The University of Wisconsin Press)

Jean Biegun's richly realized poems move through the volume as a hitchhiker might, with a spirit of play, reflection, and adventure. Sometimes the speaker feels an urgency to have the "eyes hold to wide horizons." The poems also celebrate moments closer to home when the natural world unfolds as an Eden, and a narrow and gashed tree is seen as an "unintentional sage." These poems invite you to join the journey with, for example, a mother who grieves yet finds a way to laugh at "the dirt under her nails" and embraces the springtime earth.

-Margaret Rozga, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2019-2020. Author of Holding My Selves Together: New & Selected Poems

Jean Biegun opens this collection by counting leprechauns, though she forgot herself in the count: a poet who is magical, a whisper in the pines, a wry mystic who knows "what to do with tough times" and "a marriage's slow dying." What she does is inspired by Job, gulls, trilliums, popsicle sticks, jazz heat, a wounded tree, cranes, and yes, even silence as she pulls "the thread of desire" across flashbacks both high-stepping and blue, her through-line a very tender "gladsome," always kind.

-Kathryn Gahl, author of The Velocity of Love, Messengers of the Gods, and the forthcoming The Yellow Toothbrush: A Memoir