Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 70
- Language: English
- Date Published: September 2017
- ISBN: 978-1-939929-87-7
Praise
As if responding to Rumi’s exhortation, Don’t go back to sleep, Janet MacFadyen writes, “It’s impossible to sleep with so much openness,” and these poems bristle with synaptic leaps, sonically, imagistically, metaphorically, and with a compassion for sentience — human and non-human. They weep, and water with grace. If your soul is feeling dry, these poems will quench and restore, even in their sidling up next to darkness. Quiet and powerful, a curated record of mind with aesthetic exactitude. Exquisite. —Laura McCullough
In Janet MacFadyen’s Waiting to Be Born, the weary world washes clean, and we find what emerges in the poems is tender, resilient, savory, exact, and formally delightful. We come close but not too close, faraway but not abstract and distant. There is always a spilling forth of music, silence, and questions blossoming into the answering air. Take these poems along with you as a guide, compass, and reminder of what is around you in the sensory exploration of the everyday world. You won’t be disappointed. This is an exuberant and lovely discovery of Poems! —Elizabeth Gordon McKim
Excerpt
ix
We can’t go out, the wind is fierce. The grass blade draws
its circle in the sand, the sleeper’s face against the glass.
The fire is on, the stove is out. We dance with arms
around each other, spinning dervishes.
The stovepipe blasts, it is a whistle and the whistler
is the wind, the earth a single shaking room.
The floorboards torque, the doors unhinge, and all the letters
I ever sent you tumble in with bits of acorns.
Why are we quarreling over which log to burn?
Burn all these words! They’re cluttering my good mind!
All those emails waiting for me at home! There’s a lifetime
of reading right here: you start with me, I’ll start with you.
Author
Janet MacFadyen is the author of A Newfoundland Journal (Killick Press) and two chapbooks: In the Provincelands (Slate Roof Press) and In Defense of Stones (Heatherstone Press). Her work has been nominated for the Forward and Pushcart prizes, and has appeared in numerous journals, including The Atlanta Review, Crannóg, The Malahat Review, Osiris, Poetry, and Terrain. In addition to a fellowship at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, she has had residencies at Cill Rialaig (Ireland) and the Fowler and C-Scape dune shacks in Provincetown. She works as a freelance editor and teaches community poetry workshops. She lives in the tangled woods of western Massachusetts.