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Taproot cover

Poetry | Soft cover | 106 pages | $16

Mangan’s poetry is influenced by her grandchildren, adolescence, sexuality, mortality, marriage, travel, and her keen observations of strangers. Present throughout Taproot are connections to nature and the natural world. “Like the sturdy root that lends the book its title,” Mangan writes, “the poems in Taproot honor the anchoring and nurturing elements in a life.”

Praise for Taproot

In Taproot, Kathy Mangan masterfully writes about the ‘big’ and the ‘small’ moments that constitute a life with grace, force, courage, and humor. Whether her subject is a child’s bad dream or a mother’s death, an old love or an enduring marriage, Mangan acknowledges both the darkness and light, the joy and the sorrow inherent in human experience. In these poems, Mangan is grateful witness to her own life and the lives of those around her. This is a memorable, finely wrought collection where HOPE underscores all.

Elizabeth Spires

About the Author

Kathy Mangan is the author of Above the Tree Line. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Shenandoah, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, The Pushcart Prize, and other journals and anthologies. She has given readings at numerous colleges and universities as well as the Folger Library and the Library of Congress. For more than forty years, she has taught literature and creative writing at McDaniel College, where she holds the Joan Develin Coley Chair in Creative Expression & the Arts. She lives in Baltimore and also spends time at a cabin on Cacapon Mountain in West Virginia.