Nance Van Winckel – författare

Nance Van Winckel''s wry, provocative slant on the world and her command of images and ideas enliven these stunning poems. Presented in two parts, Pacific Walkers first gives imagined voice to anonymous dead individuals, entries in the John Doe network of the Spokane County Medical Examiner''s Records. The focus then shifts to named but now-forgotten individuals in a discarded early-1900s photo album purchased in a secondhand store. We encounter figures devoid of history but enduring among us as lockered remains, and figures who come with histories--first names and dates, and faces preserved in photographs--but who no longer belong to anyone.

The new century peeled me bone bare like a songinside a warbler - that bird, people,who knows not to go where the sky''sstopped.Over the years, Nance Van Winckel''s extraordinarily precise and energetic voice has built upon its strengths. Unpredictable, wry, always provocative, displaying a sureand startling command of images and ideas, her poems make every gesture of language count. In No Starling, Van Winckel accomplishes what has proven to be so difficult for poets across time: a deeply satisfying balance of the spiritual and political. Although richly peopled with figures from this and parallel worlds - Simone Weil, Verlaine, Nabokov, Eurydice, "the new boys" working in the morgue, and others - No Starling moves beyond a reliance on the dramatic resonance of individual characters. Its vision is deeper, its focus both singular and communal: the self on its journey through the world ("Mouth, mouth: my light / and my exit. Let nothing / block the route"), and our responsibilities as a people for the precarious state of that world.SlateMy too-sharp lefts kept making the bundle in backsluice right. I was driving with the dead Nancein the truck bed. The gas gauge didn''t workso there was an added worry of runningout of juice. Her word. Her word onewindy evening with the carpetsstripped from a floor, whichsurprised us as stone - slatefrom the quarry we wereheaded to now, but Let''s first have ussome juice, she''d said, then, barefoot on bare slate.The truck-bedded Nance, wrapped in her winding sheet,thuds left, clunks right. I''m sorry about my driving,sorry about the million lovely pine moths mottledon my windshield. Thank God, here''s the quarry,and there''s the high ledge, where, as a girl longago, she''d stepped bravely from the whitetowel and stared down. Then she''d held her noseand leapt out into it - this same cool and radiant air.

In Sister Zero, a woman who never wantedchildren suddenly becomes a mother to her nine-year-old nephew after her sistercommits suicide at age 34. Fifteen years later, the boy will also kill himselfand in almost exactly the same manner.

Sister Zero is narrated through short prose sections and snippets of “advice” fromMister Ed (of the old television show), while Nance Van Winckel exhumes thesisters’ shared childhood for missed clues, interrogates memory’s accuracy, andinteracts with a mother who’s disappearing into late-stage Alzheimer’s.

As the shock of these deathsripples out, the book progresses in swift strokes between the tough and tender,often staring stony-eyed at a terrifying moment, then jumping forward orbackward in time to a moment of quiet humor.

Each chapter begins with an alteredpage from the Official Guide to the 1964 World’s Fair: collages Van Winckelmade as testaments to that touchstone event in New York when the sisters werechildren, a time she realized how huge the world was, how vastly differentother countries and cultures were from her own. The Fair was all about thefuture, its bright and happy promises. She and her now-dead sister rode a ridecalled “tunnel to the future.” The sister was scared; our narrator was not.