Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Wonderland: Falling Down the Rabbit Hole

Wonderland: Falling Down the Rabbit Hole

Nordby, Jacob A.
Donovan, Ann Q.

Paperback

Series: The Wonderland Poetry Trilogy, Book 1

General Poetry

ISBN13: 9798197531230
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 25 2026
Pages: 126
Weight: 0.39
Height: 0.30 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
What happens when a woman in her eighties survives a traumatic car accident, a head injury, a pandemic, and a major life upheaval - and finds that words are the only medicine that works?

She writes 300 poems. And then she lets them go.

Wonderland, Book 1: Nature, Ecology, and Writing Poetry is the first volume in a quietly radical three-part collection by poet Ann Donovan. Born not from ambition but from necessity, these poems emerged as a form of healing - spare, honest, and distilled to their very essence. Ann is the first to admit she is not chasing Mary Oliver's crown or Yeats's painstaking perfection. She is, in her own words, simply a recorder. And that straightforward act of bearing witness produces something unexpectedly moving.

Organized into three thematic sections, this collection invites readers into an unhurried conversation with the living world.

Part One: Nature moves through the seasons with the patience of someone who has learned, finally, not to rush. A hibernating bear, a sentinel spruce, daffodils wearing little turtlenecks made of dirty snow, a lone leaf curling into a small dish to catch the rain - these poems notice what most of us walk past. The haiku tradition of the 12th and 13th centuries is a quiet guide here, but Ann's voice is thoroughly her own: wry, warm, occasionally irreverent, and grounded in a body that knows cold and light and the smell of earth after rain. One poem in this section is only four words long.

Part Two: Ecology widens the lens. Vanishing farmland. Microplastics in the brain. A pair of bald eagles hunting over poisoned wheat. A weed struggling through a sidewalk crack with more right to be here than anyone who might pull it. These are not protest poems - they are witness poems, and their restraint gives them a particular sting.

Part Three: Writing turns inward, but gently. What is a poem for? Who is it for? Ann writes about the imposter syndrome that haunted her for years, about poems that hid in the closet and slept in drawers, about the moment a stranger read her work and said, I know what you mean - and how that small connection was everything. These poems will resonate with any writer, journal-keeper, or reluctant creative who has ever wondered whether their private words have any business being shared.

Throughout, the voice is unmistakably Ann's: a former English major who turned to Lewis Carroll rather than a style guide, who stepped between a mother bear and a gun, who still notices when the light hits the mullein plant in exactly the right way. She is funny when she needs to be, unflinching about age and mortality, and entirely uninterested in obscurity for its own sake.

This is poetry for people who say they don't read poetry - as well as for those who do.

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