Wendy Drexler is the author of Western Motel (Turning Point, 2 or 2) and the chapbook Drive-Ins, Gas Stations, the Bright Motels (Pudding House, 2007). Her first children's book, Buzz, Ruby, and Their City Chicks, coauthored with Joan Fleiss Kaplan, was published by Ziggy Owl Press in 2 or 6. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Blood Orange Review, Ibbetson Street, Nimrod, Off the Coast, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, The Mid-American Review, The Hudson Review, The Worcester Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and other journals; featured on and WBUR's Cognoscenti; and in the anthologies Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust and Burning Bright: Passager Celebrates 21 Years. She has been both a poetry editor and a cavity-nest monitor for the Massachusetts Audubon Society. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she is a native of Denver, Colorado, and lives in Belmont, Massachusetts, with her husband.

Other poems by Wendy Drexler in Verse Daily:
November 29, 2008:   "Earth" "Forgive me if I feel a little shaky...."

Books by Wendy Drexler:

Other poems on the web by Wendy Drexler:
Two poems
Four poems
"Epithalamium"
"Janis Joplin at Monterey"

Wendy Drexler's Website.

About Before There Was Before:

"'Let's take a stab at the dark,' says Wendy Drexler in her title poem, a meditation on the beginning of the universe from its terrifyingly vast empty spaces to its first life-sparks. Ignited by the intensity of her gaze, those sparks flare into visions of our world—civilizations past and present, flora and fauna both rare and common, and moments of sorrow alongside moments of grateful plenitude. With a remarkable sureness of touch that comes from knowing the contours of words, she renders what being is."
—Jennifer Barber

"This is all good stuff. Serious, playful, reverential, staccato, elegiac, timely, historical—and deeply personal—and all of it written in dark, light, and color."
—John Hanson Mitchell

"Wendy Drexler's Before There Was Before is that rare book that both ranges far, into the worlds of science, nature, and art, and moves in close, examining her own particular human experience. Drexler takes us back in time to the Big Bang and projects us 7.5 billion years into the future. She thinks about birds and elephants, flies, beetles, crickets, chameleons. She imagines Monet and Cezanne, she listens to Schubert, looks closely at film, sculpture, paintings, and photographs. The pressure of time and the consolations of intimacy, which animate these poems, carry over into the more personal poems, threading the wider vision to the tighter one. Relying always on carefully observed and imagined particulars, she parries the pressure of time with an insistence on living attentively, and we are all the better for it."
—Wendy Mnookin