With a gift for metaphor and an eye for what is strange and arresting in everyday life, JoAnn Balingit weds intimate family narratives with radiant lyric poetry about loss, passion, parenthood and a life grounded in the natural world. "JoAnn Balingit's WORDS FOR HOUSE STORY, celebrates the house of our longings, our memory, and our hopes. That house is filled with real people, imperfect, living among frogs, herons, and muskrats, watching the moon and stars, not for a sign but as emblems of what we are: watchers together. The poems are taut, poignant with love, the raw trouble of love and of families. 'Life can knock you down / Tumble your jars of black ink, ' begins 'Unfinished Lullaby.' I appreciate these poems. They go unflinchingly into the hollows and find all the light that's filtering in there." --Fleda Brown "JoAnn Balingit's poems perfectly capture what it's like to be outside, in nature, and what it's like to be vulnerable, to love, to fear-to be fully human. Her craft both sings and is as precise as a diamond cutter's. One gasps over and over at where each poem goes, through humor, heartbreak and startling observation. The surprises here are many. One comes away with a sense of gratitude and wonder at what writing can do." --Alice Elliott Dark "In these resonant poems, JoAnn Balingit shows us what is possible when the poet- mother, poet-wife, poet-poet allows herself to be gratefully confounded-allows herself, as Rilke told us, to truly love the questions." --Frank Giampietro
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