BOOK REVIEW, Anabaptist World
"Ens creates a tallgrass psalmody, observing migratory birds nesting in the Manitoba prairie — “I will try to tell the truth/to the blood feather tangled in the reeds” — interspersed with the story of her Oma’s flight (1929-1945) from Ukraine to Poland to Slovenia to Germany, here imagined by her granddaughter with the help of family history and letters. The resultant poem, “Flyway,” stretching over 100 pages, reflects in its poetic line the psychological chaos. In the final psalmody, Oma’s question, “How do you remember home?” becomes an anguished cry from the poet’s vantage point."—Raylene Hinz-Penner
BOOK REVIEW, rob mclennan's blog
"This is a collection of being and becoming, writing out what is lost, gained and abandoned; writing out what is inherited, and what can’t help but be carried across not only distances, but generations... In many ways, her lyric is akin to Cooley, writing a progression across the larger story of the rippling effect of emigration across two or three generations."—rob mclennan
BOOK REVIEW, Winnipeg Free Press
"Throughout, the speaker is careful to not let her desire "to be absolved in the homecoming/ ... / to be undone & remade, like my body is not a memory/ I keep confessing into some promise of land" to paper over the darkness of the migration story, but she holds all the context with tenderness and a grounded, careful touch."—melanie brannagan frederiksen
BOOK REVIEW, Marrow Reviews
"'Birds, like poems, follow the river'– but one instance of a potent statement, set singularly on the page, a space that allows breath, the profound pacing of silences, holding the gaze with awe."—Catherine Owen
INTERVIEW, The Weekend Morning Show (Manitoba), CBC Radio One
BOOK REVIEW, Arc Poetry Magazine
"In The World Is Mostly Sky, Ens gives us rite and sacrament, space to spread wings, expanses to “measure us / immense” (“Astronomical”). The world of sky is one that is breathtaking, and heartrending."—Frances Boyle, Arc Poetry Magazine
BOOK REVIEW, The River Volta Review of Books
"The World Is Mostly Sky is a stunning collection full of vibrancy and teeming with tenderness. Ens’s poetry first soars through childhood nostalgia and anguish, dives through thick waters of heartbreak and longing, and finally crashes up through clouds of young adulthood with ice coffees raised like chalices to the sky."—Delane Just, The River Volta Review of Books
BOOK REVIEW, Herizons
"These poems draw heavily on faith and relationships. Female friendship is key—as long and sustaining as prairie roots—and exerts a far more powerful force on the speaker's life than the ex-lovers who also pop up throughout the collection. ... The World Is Mostly Sky is a beautiful debut.
—Kerry Ryan, Herizons
"The constant motion of body and spirit, in and out of each other, this is the thread throughout this marvellous book."—Patrick Friesen
"Ens celebrates both people and prairie, complicated as each are, through her nimble pen and apt understanding of just what each poem needs."
—Allie McFarland