Cartographies of Home

Priscilla Long's nimble verse examines the difference between provenance and improvisation in how we grow up-or, to use the language of one Eastern Shore of Maryland family, how we "grow away." This portrait-in-poems' entrance into adulthood is graceful and sonically compelling: "I pull red cellophane, / open the pack, shake one out, / strike a match to flare and whiff of sulfur" (from the poem "Greyhound"). Cartographies of Home is a soulful, erudite, and ultimately playful look at life in flight.

-Sandra Beasley, author of Made to Explode: Poems

In Cartographies of Home, Priscilla Long maps memory and longing through poems of lyric tenderness: "Look for me in the sun-struck afternoon / this rainstorm can't remember." Whether in "Childhood's slow river / slid snake-bellied / down its mud-bed" or in a life of "simple things: / guacamole and toast," these poems remind us that home and history are not nostalgia, but quiet witness-and very much worth our time.

-Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Accidental Devotions

In Cartographies of Home, the self and setting often melt into each other. In one poem, the speaker is "the river's wet-eyed girl." In another, "the moon [is] yellow as pigtails." A childhood when anger was "common as dirt" is recalled and reclaimed. Priscilla Long delves into not only the pain of the distant past but recent personal losses as well by charting her "own atlas." Most of the poems are slight but complex, almost epigrammatic with their epiphanies. This is particularly apt since the reader will find a celebration of simple living and pleasures in the shorter poems.

-Allen Braden, author of A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood