Sanora Babb, well-recognized author of a novel, The Lost Traveler (1958), a memoir, An Owl on Every Post (1970), and two collections of short stories, The Dark Earth and Other Stories from the Great Depression (1987) and Cry of the Tinamou (1997), has written poetry all her life.

Her strong empathy with people and their daily lives and her ability to elevate the ordinary into the extraordinary is reflected in her poems as well as her other writings, but her poetry also quickens to her lyricism, clarity and sense of immediacy.