“Nancy Owen Nelson’s account of a road trip through the Alabama of her youth, and of her family’s history, is a deeply introspective addition to this literature. Nelson asks the hard questions of herself, and of her earlier selves: who was she and why did she make the decisions she did? How did her own whiteness function in a segregated Alabama? What does she owe history?” Jennifer Horne, former Alabama Poet Laureate.
“A poetic autoethnography, this beautiful collection of poems is a stirring synthesis of contemporary thought, historical truth, and memory. Dr. Nelson’s brilliant piece reads like a series of short stories traversing whiteness to explore, reposition, denounce, reclaim, and celebrate the dynamic splendor and terror found in a single space.” Dr. Kalvin DaRonne Harvell, Professor of Sociology, Henry Ford College, Diversity Scholar, National Center for Institutional Diversity.
“The poems are direct, gritty, nuanced, persistent, making a dark and celebratory music of connections too deep to ignore. Attentive readers will find in these accessible and richly detailed poems a mirror of their own struggles to define what kind of place they call home.” Harry Moore, author of BEARING THE FARM AWAY and BROKEN AND BLENDED: LOVE’S ALCHEMY.
Divine Aphasia “provides an avenue to understand how a childhood with a conflicted father can cast patterns of trauma-based decisions into that child’s adult relationships.” Vicky Young, Ph.D., Faculty, Undergraduate and Graduate Programs; Human Development, Psychology, and Counselor Education, Prescott College, Arizona.
This is “a narrative that only builds in power, and along the way sustains moments of profound insight.” Ann Putnam, Ph.D., author of Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughter’s Last Goodbye (University of Iowa Press).
an “intricately complex, brutally honest journey from eros to agape,including the formative experiences that lurk beneath those travels.” Jeanie O’Connor, D. Min, BCC, Director of Spiritual Care, Ascension Brighton Center for Recovery.
“. . . we enter Nelson’s liminal dreamscape into poems populated by Beckett, Godot, Hemingway, even Johnny Cash, who have passed through an aperture filled with light and longing, transfixed in time and space. . . . a collection filled with moving elegies and profound meditations on the seminal moments when one is transported to another plane via myriad conduits. Nelson’s astute introspection transfigures even the minute moments in life, making this a collection worth savoring and returning to again and again.”
Kelly Fordon, author of Goodbye Toothless House, a poetry collection, and Garden for the Blind, a novel-in-stories.
“Elegiacally channeling these ghosts, Nelson’s poems achieve a borderless color of ‘peace’ and healing ‘for lives lost in a cause that still divides us.’”
John Jeffire, author of Motown Burning and River Rouge
Searching for Nannie B: Connecting Three Generations of Southern Women
“more than a story about the search for the author’s grandmother in its invocation of a rich ancestry. . . . Personal but never simply self-referential, clear, purposeful, engaging.”
Bruce Weigl, author of The Abundance of Nothing, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, 2013.
