First published 2014
This debut poetry collection functions as a series of reporter's dispatches from the emotional territories between belonging and exile. The poems document various forms of finding home in damaged places, then confronting isolation in familiar settings. One poem captures the melancholy of autumn tennis courts, where the sound of a ball creates a sense of becoming "a memory of myself." The collection moves between inner landscapes and external realities, exploring the letdown of homecoming alongside the complex emotions of leaving. The speaker encounters unexpected moments in deteriorating locations while wrestling with the competing pulls of departure and return. Written with stark observations compressed into minimal lines, these poems map the distance between staying and going, revealing how displacement can occur even in known territory.
Genres: literary-fiction, contemporary, poetry, 21st-century
Vibes: intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
88 pages · Kindle Edition · Farrar, Straus and Giroux