Wick Poetry Chapbook Series Five – serie

In the old story of love and loss, Lisa Ampleman's I've Been Collecting This to Tell You cuts to the core of the matter with concision and subtlety. Hearts are laid bare, dissected, even grown anew. Masterfully structured and alert to the most vital details, this collection has lots to tell us and a voice at once authentic and lyrical with which to do it. Don BogenIn these poems, the beloved is a space the speaker moves through at first with trepidation, then with gathering force emerging finally into a hard-won world ravishing in its clarity under a brutally beautiful sky pinking up/like a newly healed limb. The poems of Lisa Ampleman's collection don t flinch, and the reward of their acute seeing is a song that s sustenance itself. Kerri WebsterLisa Ampleman's subtle and beautifully-wrought poems make way for the possibility that all is not frenzy in this agitated world. Although we might be the walking wounded, and like Thomas need scars to believe, the poems assure us that we heal, that wholeness and grace await us. Eric PankeyA prairie is plain, they say those who have not stood in one. And so, too, is an ordinary heartbreak, until Lisa Ampleman begins to unfold it in these closely observed and quietly surprising poems. Salvation doesn't live here, but there's plenty to salvage in the wry, self-effacing metaphors by which she harvests what wisdom experience yields. Susan Tichy

“Seven Boxes for the Country After is a book about a way-making and way-finding. It is a journey, both internal and external, across a map, over borders, through a life, and in a body. It is passage and pilgrimage, odyssey and exile. Above all it is a book of questions. What do we carry with us and what do we leave behind? Where do we keep the past and what do we keep it in? How do we measure a person, a country, a love, a loss? What do we remember? What can’t we forget? What do we declare and what do we declare it with: our words and mouths? our bodies and hands? in blue ink or black? If as Eudora Welty wrote, ‘The memory is a living thing—it too is in transit,’ then McAdams is an honest and faithful courier. The poems serve as storage boxes into which a memory is placed, then wrapped and bound. In poem after poem McAdams guides us to our most intimate spaces, the candy tin nestled between the handkerchiefs in a dresser’s top drawer, the cigar box packed in the trunk and stored in the attic, and she allows us to open and sit with our deepest selves.”—Catherine Wing“In an ideal world, all books would marry the lyricism of poetry with the narrativity of prose. They would pose questions and provide answers. They would be both accessible and elusive. They would evoke a sense of place yet remain profoundly universal. They would elicit wonder and concepts we have known our whole lives. We know we don’t live in such a world because Janet McAdams’s gorgeous and mysterious Seven Boxes for the Country After gives us an idea of what we’ve been missing in much of what’s out there. This is a beautiful collection.”—Dean Rader

“In Punctum:, Lesley Jenike’s new collection, she writes, ‘It’s our language: what can we call a thing / that is and is not.’ These poems are haunted by a ‘non-child,’ a child who was not to be born, and with it, a life the speaker was not to live. Absence itself becomes a nearly tangible presence. I don’t know how Jenike does it—breaks your heart and makes you want more—but I can’t remember the last time I read poems as smart and sure and devastatingly precise in their language, imagery, and feeling. In a poem about a fateful ultrasound, one that reveals no fetal heartbeat, she writes, ‘the doctor calls it “practice,” snapping off // the screen, tearing up the spit-out photograph. / “Next time,” she says, “it’ll be the real thing.”’ Mark my words: these poems are—and this poet is—the real thing. Punctum: is a remarkable accomplishment.”