Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner is Professor of English and Dean of Humanities and Theological Studies at Wheaton College. She is the author of four previous collections of poems, a poetry textbook, and Flannery O'Connor: A Proper Scaring. She edited the collection Imago Dei: Poems from Christianity and Literature and serves as poetry editor of The Christian Century.
""Reading--no, experiencing--the poems of Jill Baumgaertner is like entering the dawn of the eighth day of creation, they are that beautiful and true. . . . How is it that this poet can so quickly and quietly and seamlessly draw us into the living dream of the holy?"" --Paul Mariani, Boston College ""Jill Baumgaertner's beautifully crafted, musically varied, deeply spiritual poems ask us to discover transcendence in things we did not want to see or hear, ambiguities replete with paradoxes and faith. . . . Out of the 'hollow blackness' and 'dreams tinged with shadows, ' we become, through Baumgaertner's poems, like 'chrysalis, life dissolved, life begun.' What Cannot Be Fixed is Jill Baumgaertner's finest work."" --Philip C. Kolin, University of Southern Mississippi ""In his predictably pithy foreword to this volume, Martin Marty notes that 'Baumgaertner is not a confessional poet in the company of those who concentrate on themselves, whether their concentrations are revelatory or not.' And yet the poet's refreshing modesty is anything but mere timorousness. Jill Pel�ez Baumgaertner is heroically persistent in her inquiries, her doubts, and her attestations."" --Sydney Lea, Vermont Poet Laureate ""Baumgaertner most astonishes me when she creates poems seemingly ex nihilo, or better, from her own wisdom rather than from received narratives (yet those symphonic bits of midrash are quite beautiful, too). Poems like 'The Creator Dreams Creation, ' 'Ecclesiastes, ' 'Complex Phenomena, ' and many others dissolve any boundary between reader and page: a consecrated out-of-time opens, a hyphen that transcends everything it might claim to unite--language, experience, death, and life."" --Martha Serpas, author of The Dirty Side of the Storm ""Jill Pel�ez Baumgaertner's new collection of poems is a meditation on imperfection, a catalogue of flawed objects and broken beings, each fundamentally irreparable and deeply adored. The scope of this book is broad and bold, retelling the grand tale of the creation, the fall, and the redemption in terms that are contemporary, theologically imaginative, and poignantly human."" --Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, author of Saint Sinatra
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