Nancy
White grew up bouncing around the country until adolescence, when her
family settled back near its roots in Cambridge, New York. She
attended Oberlin and received her MFA at Sarah Lawrence. Her first
book, Sun, Moon, Salt, won The Washington Prize for Poetry.
She serves as Associate Editor at The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review
and Editor at The Word Works in Washington DC. She teaches at
Adirondack Community College, after wonderful stints at Saint Ann’s
School in Brooklyn and at Bennington College. Happily returned to
Cambridge, New York, she lives with her husband and son, tending the
same gardens her grand-mother planted. She has painted the farmhouse
walls red, green, yellow, blue.
In Detour, Nancy
White writes compellingly of love in all its true and skewered forms. The poems
trace the flow of a woman’s life through the channeled spaces that run through
the forms of the poems as well as over the surface, carrying us in wracked
currents to places where the channels are diverted, blocked, and, sometimes,
opened through to—if not happiness—a state of understanding that can suffice in
the absence of acceptance.
Available to the trade through Ingram and Baker & Taylor (ISBN 978-0-9796684-3-2)
Nancy White’s DETOUR is fierce, feminist, fantastic. Her wit, her precision, the threads of her narratives make beautiful and whole what is torn. Her deft syntactic disruptions mirror the domestic theater of these poems. A cougar, a poet of grace and wonder, Nancy White writes poems that are substantial, intelligent, stylistically marvelous.
—Denise Duhamel, Ka-Ching! and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems
These are poems about taking the long way around, and learning in that difficult process that you are part of a richly varied “fabric woven and sewn.” No linear consciousness or straight-laced poetry could ever make us feel, as these poems so wonderfully do, the jagged, painful work of soul-creation. Here are sharply-focused glimpses of sensuality and alliance, loss and betrayal, endurance and devotion. Here too is love and language that will surprise you. Take this detour with Nancy White happily. You'll be grateful when you see where and what it has brought you. —Fred Marchant, Full Moon Boat and The Looking House
wovenand sewn
You are no virgin listen. You must stop here. Siton the curb and look like a bum. Holdstill until you feel it too. Thereis a no rising in you like clear sap like power. Donot drill in your side. The world is not asking for this. Youare meant to stream upwards. No compromise only pause. Sitin the dirt of the road until you see. Ifit takes years it takes years. Thiswill cost less than the life you would drain from your side. Ifyou are hungry sleepless cold it is nothing to the other suffering. Thereis no such have to that lie. Weonce told it too. Don’t be ashamed. Youare part of this fabric woven and sewn. Butnot this what you contemplate willingly today. Youmay hate us for these words. It passes. Believeyou are the one in danger. Sit down.
certain
moss
you
are somewhere else by
now not where
once they
thought you weren’t crying
the
time on the stairs or time
the sky blew clouds in
procession like cages in a zoo-train
somewhere
else listening for
owls waiting out the cold as the
light goes snow up over your boots
they
think
they hear you but
you’re a star no longer in
the place your light seems to
come from
past
the dark barn farther
than these woods where
you started to learn names
of
plants walking single file
someone talking to you over a shoulder fingering
the common leaf
you
plucked from its stem past the hill
they have called Big Trestle under
rusted wire
out
past the edge that dissolving
place where
particles of light cling to
the lip of the earth
not
about waiting today or the name of a
certain moss
whose spore-heads float like tiny
flames an inch above
the
green bed on filaments too fine to see but
when they turn to the spot you were
granted to occupy
the
syllables of your name ready that
is not where you are no not
where you’ll be
wives
When
you spoke of your man they said how
terrible and you said how terrible when
they
spoke of theirs. Solace in their stories,
the
magnificent sameness. After the final papers,
your
mother made casserole for moving day,
but
none of the wives came or sent their terrible men
to
help, good women who used to call often,
who
said how terrible, who said poor you.
Nancy
White grew up bouncing around the country until adolescence, when her
family settled back near its roots in Cambridge, New York. She
attended Oberlin and received her MFA at Sarah Lawrence. Her first
book, Sun, Moon, Salt, won The Washington Prize for Poetry.
She serves as Associate Editor at The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review
and Editor at The Word Works in Washington DC. She teaches at
Adirondack Community College, after wonderful stints at Saint Ann’s
School in Brooklyn and at Bennington College. Happily returned to
Cambridge, New York, she lives with her husband and son, tending the
same gardens her grand-mother planted. She has painted the farmhouse
walls red, green, yellow, blue.
In Detour, Nancy
White writes compellingly of love in all its true and skewered forms. The poems
trace the flow of a woman’s life through the channeled spaces that run through
the forms of the poems as well as over the surface, carrying us in wracked
currents to places where the channels are diverted, blocked, and, sometimes,
opened through to—if not happiness—a state of understanding that can suffice in
the absence of acceptance.
