Good Press for Arboretum in a Jar

Cover image for Frances Donovan's collection of poetry "Arboretum in a Jar"

Mom Egg Review posted a blurb about my book in their last issue, and then this full-length review from Jiwon Choi most recently. Her thoughtful examination of my work made me feel seen. Here’s one excerpt:

Here the frayed lives of troubled A-list princesses Snow White and Rapunzel take up ample real estate, alongside a gaggle of B-listers with such tongue-in-[cheek] monikers as Fox News -,  Stoner -, and Manic Episode Princess, all struggling to deal with their own off shades of infamy.  Stoner Princess puts it best when she says that “she feels like a fish caught in a weir/ A blueberry caught in a mouth.”   A condition Anne Carson could be describing when she writes of the “soul trapped in glass,” not entirely the victim but “a slow collusion of Master and victim within one voice.”

Read the whole review

Almost-Haiku: The Witches

three crab-apple sisters
standing close together
lichen on their dead branches
and on their live ones
tiny yellow fruit

I Met Berserk (After Wallace Stevens)

Through the rain
And the lights
I met myself
I met berserk
On the traffic island between fifth and main
“you have so much left to learn” he told me,
Taking hold of the scruff of my neck
And shaking
And shaking

[This is a stub. It echoes three poems: one that I wrote in high school, which was inspired  “Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks,” by Wallace Stevens; and also The Great Figure, by William Carlos Williams]

November Haiku

the mind is silent
sun slants into afternoon
the air, almost warm

bare branches tracing
against a cloudless, pale sky
sun sets them glowing