Thin Soup

In Thin Soup, Stephen James Penner explores eternal themes of life and death, love and longing, hope and sorrow, beauty and lament. The poems are personal, a good number reflecting the wonderings within the poet who is a Mennonite Christian, and thus a pacifist, who believes the divine spark resides within all human beings. He is a product of the sixties in American life, a unique slice of our country's history.The dramatic social and cultural happenings of those days are always with him and come through in this collection. With appreciation for complicated spaces as he searches for clarity, the multi-cultural experiences he has lived have informed and enriched his life, and his writings.

"These deeply human poems honor what endures-relationships, compassion, wonder, and the courage to let go..."

-LARRY DUNN, author of A Beanie and a Cup of Tea: A Father's Poems of Loss and Love

"Thin Soup is both an elegy and a prayer...aflame with rage at injustice while also full of gentle invitations to accept the everyday gifts of wonder that arrive in the shape of a plum, a handshake, a song."

-DEBORAH LYONS, English instructor, Reedley (CA) College

"A consummate storyteller, Stephen Penner's poems lead us on epic journeys: across continents and centuries, to childhood and back, through political realities, into both the mundane and the profound."

-HOPE NISLY, political organizer and retired librarian

"Steve's poems-accessible, story-driven, dusted with earth-do what poetry does best; inviting us into this ordinary place, this ordinary time, this ordinary body to bring us not beyond the ordinary but so deeply into it such that memory, conversations within and between, connection to place, other, and the Divine holding is-embroidered in gold."

-JULIA BAKER, poet, author of The Moon is Always Whole