Writing about your childhood and teen years is hard, not just because of the natural tendency to make ourselves the heroes of our stories, which can often lead to being really understanding about why you did dumb shit but not so much about the other people who were (or weren’t) there, and not just because … Continue reading Reclamation Part 6
Reclamation Part 4
This is the fourth installment about my multi-section poem responding to Robert Frost's "The Gift Outright." Here's a link to parts 1, 2 and 3. When I was young, the world felt impossibly small to me, but simultaneously too large to fathom. By young I mean the time when this poem takes place, so high … Continue reading Reclamation Part 4
Reclamation Part 3
This is the third installment about my multi-section poem responding to Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright.” Here are links to parts 1 and 2. Slidell was a suburb when I lived there, a bedroom community. Most adults worked in New Orleans like my parents did. They drove the Twin Spans or Highway 11 across the … Continue reading Reclamation Part 3
Reclamation Part 2
This is the second installment about “Reclamation,” a response poem to Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright.” Part 1 is here. We moved around a lot when I was young—by the time I started second grade I’d been in four schools in two states—but when we got to Slidell, we stayed. We moved there in the … Continue reading Reclamation Part 2
Another Poem to Love 