Description

 

Thin Soup

by Stephen James Penner

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.

 

Early Praise

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 

In Thin Soup, Stephen Penner traces the winding paths of memory, faith, love, loss, and belonging through poems rooted in farm fields, distant cultures, family histories, and ordinary acts of grace. With the wisdom of age and the curiosity of a lifelong traveler, he reflects on what it means to be human in a world marked by beauty and sorrow, where personal grief is inseparable from the suffering and hope of others. These deeply human poems honor what endures—relationships, compassion, wonder, and the courage to let go—while searching for meaning in the seasons that shape every life.

—Larry Dunn, author of A Beanie and a Cup of Tea: A Father’s Poems of Loss and Love

In Thin Soup the world is large and small, we are lost and found, spaces and words- the spaces between words and the words between spaces rest heavy on the eyes. Penner examines a life and asks questions, some dangerous and some answered. He relates experiences from Africa, from California’s central valley, from Oregon, from a young man, from now, and from duty and from intention. Thin Soup is anything but.

—Marc Janssen, Salem Poetry Project and author of November Reconsidered

Thin Soup is both an elegy and a prayer— for lives and days lost and for peace yet to be realized. This collection of poems is full of startling imagery that holds in tension the personal and the political, memory with the grace of letting go, and connection in the midst of loneliness. Mud becomes a woman, an artist’s sculpture transmuted into resistance to abusive power. Memories blur between the explosive energy of fútbol and the destructive power of missiles to recall an ethics of responsibility for the other. Thin Soup is 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. That these poems are attentive to the limits of words to bridge these tensions is part of what makes them so profound.

—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. Reading this collection moves us through loss and anxiety, into the mystery of hope and the haunting beauty that comes when we walk each other through the morass.

—Hope Nisly, political organizer and retired librarian

 

About the Author

Stephen James Penner lives with his wife of 50 years, Glena, in Salem, Oregon. A native Californian, he lived in Africa for six years but spent most of his life under the hot sun of the San Joaquin Valley in the Golden State. For a season he ran marathons and maintains exercise rhythms to this day. He follows soccer, the Pittsburgh Pirates, and appreciates intelligent, animated, meditative conversation. His years working with Mennonite Central Committee and as a Mennonite pastor have informed his life and poetry. His previous books include a memoir, Tea in the Desert, and two previous books of poetry, A Simple Meal and February Run.