Broken Umbrellas opens with an address to the poet’s “flappy, faulty heart,” casting a shadow of mortality that only deepens the rich narratives and carefully observed landscapes that follow, beginning with the poet’s childhood. The book invites us into places that are brimming with gardens and abundantly inhabited by animals as well as people. Nothing is perfect in this “sloppy and delicious” fallen world, where “small dangers” are courted and a “god of detritus” is imagined. But what a pleasure it is to follow Jane Edna Mohler as she journeys through her life, “balancing what is not said” with what so movingly is.

—Martha Collins

It is appropriate that the first words in Jane Edna Mohler’s new book address the heart; though according to the doctors, hers may be “faulty,” in the eyes of those of us who love poetry there is no heart more courageously generous. Everywhere you turn in Broken Umbrellas you are rewarded with poems attuned to the world, whether it be glycoproteins or thrift store suitcoats or the chocolate-scented earth of her father’s garden or a Guangzhou Street Market or blood orange lips. “If you find me here/ everything will be yours as well,” reminding us how, despite the world’s injustices and ironies, its threatening mortality, “Today you have soup.” You will keep savoring this brave and delightful book’s healing nutrients, its bugs and worms puttering below the fronds, its bat-textured skies, its equanimously gliding, dark-eyed hawks, its straight, delicate furrows. 

—Christopher Bursk

These poems are infused with striking images—“the jigsaw shade of cool leaves,” “the empty cereal box of winter” – sharing the challenges of the human condition: the hospital, its neighboring museum, and the ongoing excavations that bind them; the goldfish and the nuthatch enacting their slow and sudden ends. Here is a rarity—a poet with a wry sense of humor that meets the difficulties of life without diminishing their import. The marvelous image of “thick-coated poems, lightly crunching on bones in the woods” could be an ars poetica.

—Margaret Holley