May 22, 2022: One of the best parts of writing poetry is when you push aside your keyboard to gather with other poets. A new favorite gathering/reading opportunity is A Persistence of Cormorants, curated by Gerald Wagoner at (outside) the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club in Brooklyn. 

Here I am with Lisa Andrews (The Inside Room, Indolent Books) and Amy Holman, literary consultant and poetry editor for Westchester Review. 

I also met Iris Dunkle who was in town to hear Nicole Callihan and Sanjana Nair read. Iris is poetry program director for the Napa Valley Writers Conference, which offers its participants a panel discussion about first books. It's a crazy challenge to get attention for your fledglings. So it was no small thing when I received this generous review and nomination from Jennie Hann for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for a first book.  What I didn't realize until just now is that Jennie's review is a perfect introduction to my new manuscript in progress. In Practice Baby, I bring to the foreground the embedded story of unwanted pregnancy that hovers at the margins of Crossing Pleasure Avenue. 

There is a powerful story embedded here, one with its origins in the era before abortion was legal in the United States. This history hovers, ghostlike, at the margins of the collection. In the haunting opening poem, for instance, the speaker recalls how, as a child, she would trace the branches of the family tree in her grandmother’s bible, adding, “Back then I had no reason / to doubt the space beneath my name would one day be filled with anything / less than desire.” Later, in the book’s title poem, the speaker, now an adult on a day-trip to the seashore, describes watching a mother turtle lead its newborn young to the water’s edge, then returning indoors to join friends “jostling for a place at the end of the bar, / to sit with our handbags swaddled / to our chests like the babies / we never had.” Finally, in a poignant Emersonian homage entitled “On Leaving” (which, fittingly, ends the volume), she relates how a “Mama Osprey” swoops down, “so close I can see her underbelly,” hanging suspended over her head for an instant as though in judgment. “How could she know that I was a mother too? / That unlike her, I had a choice.”  —Jennie Hann, NBCC fellow