CLOSE ENCOUNTERS Down Home - Yenser, Pamela

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Résumé :
Everything abandoned comes alive Pamela Yenser writes in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS Down Home, which becomes an invocation for resilience in a world filled with disaster at every turn: whether it's the wreckage of flying saucers in Roswell, or a brother and a mother who are irrevocably changed after a complicated birth, or an abusive father who is always in the driver's seat-whether it's by plane or car. Yenser does the difficult work of reckoning with trauma and the family / history slamming the lid on truth. And though there's comfort in escape, and beauty to be found in the landscapes these poems traverse in a wide range of traditional and open poetic forms, Yenser reminds us As long as you live / you won't forget, and there's danger everywhere. Lucky for us, we have a wonderful guide who knows her way around language and line, and is cunning enough to have razor blades sewn / into the hem of every poem. -Gary Jackson Pamela Yenser is a learned poet who knows the context, history, and texts of literature. Here she uses her supple and strict prosody to tell a family story about an abusive, daredevil father, a denying-praying mother, her little retarded brother (She is her brother's keeper) and more. In airplanes and Airstream trailers one catastrophe after another happens to mark a childhood where Visions of the devil / made you tithe, trade in the family silver. This astonishing chapbook delivers one revelation after another in poems exquisitely structured: The past is a trap the Jaws of Life / can't break, she writes, ... but isn't this the work a poet is meant to do? One poem in exact rhyming couplets is called In the Garden of Demented Parents. Another, also in couplets, ends: Look! I have razor blades sewn / into the hem of every poem. Read this brilliant and triumphant chapbook by a poet who limns the tragedy and triumph of her life. -Hilda Raz Pamela Yenser's brave and tender poems spin together family history, personal resilience, and imaginative perseverance sharp as that wreckage/ strewn like tinsel on glitter-/fields of tumbled rock (as she writes in the title poem). Encompassing everything from a bad weather balloon made of Kryptonite to a pineapple/ ruffled doily, Yenser juxtaposes the images and dreams of the otherworldly and the day-to-day life while also writing deeply of love and survival, monsters and angels, magic tricks and memories. This is a captivating and sparkling collection. -Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg Pamela Yenser's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS refers to, yes, the Roswell UFO, as well as family relationships that are a parallel encounter. The poems' narrator sees the flying saucer wreckage as a four-year-old. She writes about this iconic disruption of the skies as a way to reveal the workings of memory itself. This is an exciting personal fable that blends journalism, verse, and narration. -Denise Lowe

Biographie:
PAMELA YENSER is a creative nonfiction and poetry writer of witness. Awards include: 2020 First Place NM Press Women NF/folklore Prize for Twilight at the Kimo Theatre, 2020 poetry finalist at Witness Magazine for Snow Angels, 2019 award at W. B. Yeats Poetry Society of NY for To Mary Shelley, Regarding Monsters, 2019 Winner of the Ithaca Lit Difficult Fruit Poetry Prize for Damn, Il Pleut, 2018 Bosque Poetry Winner for Tenants of Greece, and an Academy of American Poets Award for New Ways Home. After supervising libraries and international internships, editing at several presses, and teaching undergrad through graduate English, Yenser established NM Book Editors, a family business dedicated to developing and editing literary work.