Jane O. Wayne, From the Night Album

Jane O. Wayne, a local poet with a 10,000-foot view of life, has a new book out from Pecan Grove Press: From the Night Album. Jane read from the book at the final poetry event in this season's River Styx series at Duff's to a packed house.

Jane Wayne is a poet who approaches her work with a gloved hand and a hammer -- she's dedicated and serious about her work, about poetry and what it might mean, what it might do, and she comes at it via mundane acts such as ...walking into a room, opening a drawer, looking at an old photograph. She comes at it with a dignity and dedication that make small poems into vast journeys of the interior. "I think of myself as a domestic poet," she said during the reading: her poems reflect interiors, objects, furniture. But that's where the domesticity stops. "Things...speak to me," she went on. And they do. "Nothing is ordinary. The ordinary is often extraordinary." Yes, it is.

Jane's new book is available locally in St. Louis at Left Bank Books. If you're not lucky enough to be near an independent bookstore, you can of course find it on Amazon.

Her book is reviewed by Aaron Belz in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/entertainment/reviews.nsf/book/story/BBA3D56F9608D136862572BD000F9D93?OpenDocument