Where I Live

Finalist, 2022 Blue Light Book Award

Pat Underwood grew up on an Iowa farm, married her high school sweetheart, and together they raised two sons on a country hillside northwest of Colfax, Iowa where the plentiful wildlife inspired many of her poems. After receiving her college degree at the age of 44, she worked in early education and retired in 2017 from her employment with the State of Iowa. Former publications include two poetry chapbooks - Portraits (Finishing Line Press 2017) and Gatherings (Celestial Light Press 2007). Her play kit The Last Supper (Meriwether Publishing Ltd.; Contemporary Drama Service 1997) travels the nation. Underwood's poems received a 2001 Pushcart Prize Nomination, a 1996 Founder's Award, and a 2002 Founder's Award from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies.

"These poems of quiet contemplation and gentle celebration of life carve their images out of an understated language elegant in its directness and radiant in its clarity. Whether remembering her childhood, commemorating beloved family members, reliving the loss of a husband, or observing the landscape of her rural home, Pat Underwood welcomes us into kinship with where she lives. Her precise attention to the natural world and her calmly passionate response to her surroundings help to illuminate the caterpillars, wood ducks, cattle, cottonwoods, and characters she reveals to us. Of earthworms, Underwood writes, they resurrect the holy ground. The same might be said of these poems. Each one revives in us the very act of seeing."

- Jeanne Emmons, author of The Red Canoe

"Reading Pat Underwood's Where I Live is like sitting with the poet on a porch swing at her home in the country and letting the beauty of her warmth and tenderness cascade over you in a healing wash. These poems are honest, perceptive, deeply felt, and superbly articulated with crisp imagery that resonates long after you've read them. They deal with the sadness and joy of family, love and nature, even tragedy with the calmest and clearest of hearts. She speaks as if she knows you, as if you and she are friends, as well you will be after venturing deep in the heart of where she lives. It is well worth the visit."

- Michael Carey, author of The Holy Ground

"Pat Underwood's voice is one singing out from the fields of Iowa. Embrace her words and listen to the melodies of rural America."

- Loretta Diane Walker, author of Day Begins When Darkness Is in Full Bloom

"Anyone who's read Pat Underwood's poems knows her clear and lyrical images of rural Iowa life: Snake grass, wild and outstretched/slithers along the creek bank (Country Road). But the poems in her new book live in the wider world, too, of family and travel, of love and grief, of doubt and acceptance. Not even mosquitoes, she says in The Dinner Party, can spoil/my sense of being a woman - /this place of our beautiful selves. Where I Live is Pat Underwood at the top of her game - a beautiful, lyric book."

- Keith Ratzlaff, author of Who's Asking?