What lies on the other side of the mirror - beyond the world we can see, touch, and name?
In Falling Down the Rabbit Hole, the first volume of the Wonderland Poetry Trilogy, Ann Q. Donovan walked attentively through the natural world. In Wonderland, Book 2: Through the Looking Glass, she steps through the glass entirely - into the bigger questions: human consciousness, the nature of memory, the mysteries of identity and time, and what it might mean to truly wake up.
Organized into four movements, this is a collection for anyone who has stood before a tree "slack-jawed at its beauty" and felt time stop. For anyone who has wondered about the caves of Lascaux, the silence of God, the distance between what we believe and what is actually true.
Part One: Whimsy opens lightly - a glazed donut melting in an Idaho summer, a letter of apology to the physical body, hearing aids named for Odin's ravens. Ann's humor here is warm and self-deprecating, earning the reader's trust before the deeper dives ahead.
Part Two: Consciousness is the philosophical heart of the collection - a sweeping meditation on the origins of human awareness, cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira, cellular memory, the dissolution of ego, and the ancient longing to belong to something larger than the self. These poems draw on mythology, archaeology, quantum physics, and the world's spiritual traditions without belonging exclusively to any of them.
Part Three: Memories turns tender. Frozen sheets on a clothesline. A grandmother's answer to a seven-year-old who asks if dying hurts. A fox fur draped around a mother's neck. Grandchildren who carry the faces of people long gone. These are the poems that make you put the book down for a moment.
Part Four: Philosophy closes with large, quiet questions - about God, certainty, language, the return of the goddess, and what the ancient Egyptians knew about the heart. Ann is sure of less and less, she admits. In that admission, she opens something rare: a philosophy of not-knowing that still manages to be warm.
This is poetry for seekers. For the philosophically curious. For anyone navigating the long country of aging with their eyes still wide open.
The Wonderland Poetry Trilogy: Book 1: Falling Down the Rabbit Hole · Book 2: Through the Looking Glass · Book 3: We're All Mad Here
