Blue Between Owls: Blue Chore Coat and Other Collected Poems

In Blue Between Owls, the poems draw their painterly images from the landscape, wildlife, and people of the rural Midwest, and from the Teays River, the ancient underground tributary that flows beneath them all.

In Blue Between Owls, the calls of great-horned owls from the tangled woods become both metaphors for longing and calls to prayer. These poems draw their images and inquiries from the landscape of the rural Midwest, its green seas of corn and soybeans, its great expanse of sky above, and the Teays River, that ancient underground tributary that flows below, informing the way faith might inform a life, giving rise to praise. In the "Migration" poems, which walk with a beloved friend through her final illness, a bird-sown sunflower springs up in the burn pile and is transformed into flame the way we may hope to be transformed into light-bearing beings in this world.

Daye Phillippo says she's lived her life backwards, first raising a large family and later earning degrees in Creative Writing from Purdue University (2011) and Warren Wilson MFA for Writers (2014). She is the recipient of a Mortarboard Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Grant for work in progress, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship for poetry. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was selected by Educational Testing Services for inclusion in the AP English exam. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Midwest Quarterly, LETTERS, Shenandoah, Cider Press Review, One Art, Natural Bridge, Presence, The Windhover, and many others. She taught English at Purdue University and now hosts a Poetry Hour at her local library at which Katniss, the library cat, is also a welcomed guest. Phillippo lives with her husband in a creaky old farmhouse in rural Indiana, where she tends a garden and a lively flock of Barred Rock hens. Thunderhead, her debut collection of poems, was published by Slant in 2020. Her second collection, Blue Between Owls, won the 2024 Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award.