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After All is the chronicle of a woman’s ordinary life. Girls wonder what it is their mothers do all day, only to learn the truth when they become mothers themselves. Siblings torment each other. Lovers enchant and disappoint. The dead never quite leave. Along the way there is sex and grief, anger and tenderness, as Daneman explores what it means, after all, to have been a daughter, a wife, a mother. The poems are like snapshots, capturing moments otherwise lost. After All is about growing up and growing old, getting along with family and getting by alone.
You can purchase the book at full price through the publisher or Bookshop.org, but the best way is to email me. I will send you a signed copy, shipping included for a special price of $15, payable by Venmo, PayPal or check. Reviews "In this first full-length collection of poems, Daneman pulls us into the all that is living and dying. The poems are catalogs and songs, dreams and elegies—with a voice of startling clarity about relationships—how we long for them, live in and through them, even when they don’t fully satisfy. “My mother never once slapped me / though I could feel as if her grief were inside me, / how much she wanted to / how far she could see every time she looked into my eyes.” The poet’s keen perceptions as reflected in the speaker’s emotional landscape resonate throughout." --Gail Goepfert, Rhinopoetry.org (Full review. ) "Why should you buy another book of poetry? Why this one? Because, for one thing, these poems were written by someone you’d probably like to know--someone who has lived a conscious life, from the cruelties of childhood through the middle passage of grief to the later times when it all comes together in the assurance of love made real." --B.K. Loots "Pat Daneman is one of my favorite poets, probably not well known outside a devoted circle of family and Kansas City friends (I am one of these), in part because she publishes her first book this year. Buy it, especially if you are a person over 50 or a person who has lost a family member or if you are a woman. That should cover just about everyone. Her writing concerns, often but not always, her loss of a spouse. This is not the only theme, but it makes the book essential reading." —Denise Low (deniselow.blogspot.com) |
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To buy directly from me for $15 and free shipping, email me at pat dot daneman4 at gmail dot com. Use button to buy from Bookshop.org.
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Where the World Begins is dedicated to "my mother and her family, who gave me the gift of making things up."
As children, my cousins and I heard a lot of stories--about ghosts, bar fights, tornadoes--that left us with vivid impressions of our grandparents' and parents' lives as cotton sharecroppers in northeast Louisiana during the Depression. My mother, my grandmother, my aunts and uncles all loved to talk about how bad they had it and how much fun they had. Who knows what was true and what was a tiny bit embroidered. I didn't meet several of my cousins until a few years ago. When I did, it was at a first-ever family reunion, where we gathered in the kitchen of Aunt Hazel's haunted house and discovered we all knew the same stories.
The twenty poems in Where the World Begins are an attempt to capture their memories, their mischief and their joy.
Reviews
These poems do not simply tell the most important stories--they sing those stories. . . . The songs are grief-stricken, as many of the old songs are, but they know how to recognize love in the rough touch of a mother's hands tugging a comb through the knots. They know what belonging is, they can hear that 'Every stone says he has to stay here,' where the 'he' in the poem is all of us and the 'here' is the home we are all searching for." --Susanna Lang, author of Travel Notes from the River Styx, Even Now and Tracing the Lines
These evocative poems cut to the bone of the human condition. They are stories about people and the ghosts who won't let them forget ... people who "remember the recipes, the back way to the graveyard." There are tender touches and callused hands. "Where the World Begins" is a collection of poems about place, too. Rural, fertile, wild, hard places ... places you want to cling to and flee from, where "distance is frozen like a river ribbed with ice, waves tricked by the wind into leaping early." The characters and places in this work are more than familiar; these are my people, my land. And I know them better now. --Gary Marx, author of A River through Illinois
As children, my cousins and I heard a lot of stories--about ghosts, bar fights, tornadoes--that left us with vivid impressions of our grandparents' and parents' lives as cotton sharecroppers in northeast Louisiana during the Depression. My mother, my grandmother, my aunts and uncles all loved to talk about how bad they had it and how much fun they had. Who knows what was true and what was a tiny bit embroidered. I didn't meet several of my cousins until a few years ago. When I did, it was at a first-ever family reunion, where we gathered in the kitchen of Aunt Hazel's haunted house and discovered we all knew the same stories.
The twenty poems in Where the World Begins are an attempt to capture their memories, their mischief and their joy.
Reviews
These poems do not simply tell the most important stories--they sing those stories. . . . The songs are grief-stricken, as many of the old songs are, but they know how to recognize love in the rough touch of a mother's hands tugging a comb through the knots. They know what belonging is, they can hear that 'Every stone says he has to stay here,' where the 'he' in the poem is all of us and the 'here' is the home we are all searching for." --Susanna Lang, author of Travel Notes from the River Styx, Even Now and Tracing the Lines
These evocative poems cut to the bone of the human condition. They are stories about people and the ghosts who won't let them forget ... people who "remember the recipes, the back way to the graveyard." There are tender touches and callused hands. "Where the World Begins" is a collection of poems about place, too. Rural, fertile, wild, hard places ... places you want to cling to and flee from, where "distance is frozen like a river ribbed with ice, waves tricked by the wind into leaping early." The characters and places in this work are more than familiar; these are my people, my land. And I know them better now. --Gary Marx, author of A River through Illinois
New in 2022
Mapping the Distance, full-length collection. Currently seeking publisher.
Inside the Tidy House of Love, chapbook. Currently seeking publisher.
from Mapping the Distance
The Garden
I am made out of rain now.
You can put your hands right through me.
I am wailing and sleeplessness
and unwashed hair. Some days I rise
to take an orange from the table,
and you hope I will let you lead me
into air, return me a limb
at a time to breath and bone.
I swallow without eating, answer
without words. Never have I had to live
among so many flowers, so much
whispering among roots.
from Inside the Tidy House of Love
Inside the Tidy House of Love
There was a man who loved his wife more
than any man who’s ever lived has ever loved.
Every morning when he woke up, he looked
to her side of the bed to make sure she was there.
He kissed her shoulder. He kissed the ends of her hair.
He would come up behind her at the kitchen sink
and kiss her neck. She’d turn around and laugh.
She loved him just as much as he loved her,
but she was happier keeping it to herself.
Have you ever seen two women who love each other together in a bath?
They shave each other’s legs. They wash each other’s hands and feet.
One bends her breasts to the water and the other with a finger walks
her spine as if each knot were a steppingstone.
There was a woman whose husband stopped coming home,
stopped wearing his wedding ring. She got dressed alone in the morning,
read the depths of the sky at night. Every day
she became more beautiful—she didn’t know
if she would need what she was learning
for when he came back
or for when he did not.
Have you ever seen two men who love each other kiss?
Two men who have taken years to understand each other.
The tenderness within their eyes,
the tenderness between their fingers
makes you wish that one
or the other
or both of them
could be in love with you, too.
There was a man whose best idea of affection
was to sneak up behind his wife and smack her hard
on the behind. When company came, he’d send her
into the kitchen to get him another beer and while she was gone
tell everyone the only reason he’d married her
was because she was so ugly, he knew she’d never leave him.
When she died, his anger could not be contained.
In his house her name could no longer be spoken.
Day by day, he raised an altar to her
with offerings of empty bottles, newspapers, coffee cups and spoons.
Every morning he stood at the blank mouth of the refrigerator
and wrote her name inside his head.
Mapping the Distance, full-length collection. Currently seeking publisher.
Inside the Tidy House of Love, chapbook. Currently seeking publisher.
from Mapping the Distance
The Garden
I am made out of rain now.
You can put your hands right through me.
I am wailing and sleeplessness
and unwashed hair. Some days I rise
to take an orange from the table,
and you hope I will let you lead me
into air, return me a limb
at a time to breath and bone.
I swallow without eating, answer
without words. Never have I had to live
among so many flowers, so much
whispering among roots.
from Inside the Tidy House of Love
Inside the Tidy House of Love
There was a man who loved his wife more
than any man who’s ever lived has ever loved.
Every morning when he woke up, he looked
to her side of the bed to make sure she was there.
He kissed her shoulder. He kissed the ends of her hair.
He would come up behind her at the kitchen sink
and kiss her neck. She’d turn around and laugh.
She loved him just as much as he loved her,
but she was happier keeping it to herself.
Have you ever seen two women who love each other together in a bath?
They shave each other’s legs. They wash each other’s hands and feet.
One bends her breasts to the water and the other with a finger walks
her spine as if each knot were a steppingstone.
There was a woman whose husband stopped coming home,
stopped wearing his wedding ring. She got dressed alone in the morning,
read the depths of the sky at night. Every day
she became more beautiful—she didn’t know
if she would need what she was learning
for when he came back
or for when he did not.
Have you ever seen two men who love each other kiss?
Two men who have taken years to understand each other.
The tenderness within their eyes,
the tenderness between their fingers
makes you wish that one
or the other
or both of them
could be in love with you, too.
There was a man whose best idea of affection
was to sneak up behind his wife and smack her hard
on the behind. When company came, he’d send her
into the kitchen to get him another beer and while she was gone
tell everyone the only reason he’d married her
was because she was so ugly, he knew she’d never leave him.
When she died, his anger could not be contained.
In his house her name could no longer be spoken.
Day by day, he raised an altar to her
with offerings of empty bottles, newspapers, coffee cups and spoons.
Every morning he stood at the blank mouth of the refrigerator
and wrote her name inside his head.