Strange Gift by Veronica Kornberg
Wandering Aengus Press, April 2026
Winner of the 2025 Wandering Aengus Press Book Award in Poetry
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This debut collection, by a poet whose work often celebrates nature, delivers an abundance of earth, sand, and sea. Divided into three neat sections, Strange Gift reads much like a sustained meditation. The poet, who has spent many years along the central coast of California, has not missed a single opportunity to find meaning in the sights, sounds, textures, and smallest details of the world into which she wakes each day. As the reader makes their way through these poems, shifting this way and that, along with the poet’s tiny turns in direction, metaphor emerges alongside literal meaning. These poems accumulate knowledge as they go, much like their human speaker.
Consider the collection’s title poem, “Strange Gift.” This perfectly-sized prose poem centers on a memory from childhood during which the speaker climbed into a hiding space behind her mother’s closet. Once there, her imagination would escape the noise of daily life:
and I felt
a great set of wings settle overhead, a soft and living roof
and I thought maybe there was a place for me in this world.
The language here, and in much of this book, urges the reader gently forward. There is no pushing and pulling toward easy resolution, just that gentle urging.
I am particularly enamored of the gardening motif in Strange Gift. Here, there is an exuberance to engaging with even the most under-celebrated aspects of tending garden. Consider the task of weeding, as in the poem entitled “Sunday”:
It’s embarrassing,
the degree of pleasure taken/in the easing of an intact root
from the loam. That slight give/of the fleshy taper
glowing faintly/like an upside-down altar candle/pulled from the dark.
Through the use of repetition, slight adjustments in perspective and elegant diction, Kornberg shapes the concept of tending and cultivating into a framework for the entire collection. Her speaker combines a childlike wonder with a very mature determination. She is as persistent the weeds she plucks from her garden.
Treat yourself to a copy of Strange Gift. It’s a lovely spring read!