First Person by Pauletta Hansel
First Person
My friends are writing
in third person now,
they wander through their pages in disguise,
bone and blood beneath
the paper doll of she.
They are trying
to find the story lines,
delicate crisscross of fate and choice,
plump spider of meaning
at the center of a life.
I am stuck with myself—
the web, the spider,
the sac of eggs,
the wings of flies brittle as last year’s leaves—
all me.
“My friends are writing in third person now”, Pauletta Hansel tells us in the title poem of this collection. “They are trying to find the story lines…plump spider of meaning”, while “I am stuck with myself”. I’m here to assure you that being stuck with a Pauletta Hansel poem is like being handed the finest of cobwebs caught intact on a black velvet cushion: all we can do is marvel at the intricacies there, and delight in their presentation. Hansel takes the stuff of her life- that first person world- and spins a web which takes in all of us who have lived awhile. We travel through her poems blessed “with light for (our) journey”, feeling not like voyeurs but companions for whom, Hansel claims, “I must still give thanks.” Enlarged by our journey, we offer our thanks back to her.
Dana Wildsmith, author of Our Bodies Remember and One Good Hand
Pauletta Hansel’s poetry has been featured in journals including Wind, Mountain Review, Adena, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Appalachian Journal, and anthologized in A Gathering at the Forks, Old Wounds, New Words, A Kentucky Christmas and Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia. Her first collection of poems, Divining, published in 2002, resulted in her selection by the Ohio Poetry Day Association as Poet of the Year and as Best Local Author by readers of the Cincinnati arts periodical CityBeat. Other awards include a Post-Corbett Award in Literary Arts, a residency at Hedgebrook Women Writers Retreat and the Antioch Writers Workshop’s Bill Baker Scholarship. Pauletta is Co-Director of Grailville Retreat and Education Center in Loveland, OH and an independent artist/consultant, leading creative writing workshops and other programs in schools, community centers and prisons. She lives in Cincinnati with her husband, Owen Cramer.
Product Details
Chapbook: 21 pages of Poetry
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-1-933675-27-5
