Namesake - Softcover

Fiset, Joan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0911287744 ISBN 13: 9780911287745

Publisher: Blue Begonia Press, 2015

Synopsis

Poetry, prose and photography about the author's mother.

About this title

About the Author:

Joan Fiset is a therapist in private practice and teaches writing courses at Richard Hugo House. Her book of memoir prose poems, Now the Day is Over, (Blue Begonia 1997) won the King County Publication Award. Her poems and short fiction appear in Trickhouse, Tarpaulin Sky, the Seattle Review, Kirkus Review, BlazeVox and others. website: joanfiset.com

Review:

This moving chronicle portrays a daughter s profound re-collections of her mother in staccato-like scenes, each building upon the next. Poetic phrases erupt without warning from descriptive prose, where her mother is just beneath the surface, never far from the text. The child s mind s-eye is keen and curious. Moments of warmth between mother and daughter intersperse with the first hints of danger, fracture, and loss. The adolescent watches helplessly as her mother slides into terrors and inner torments skillfully rendered by the narrator. Subtle use of the spoken, unspoken, and ambiguous evoke feelings words often fail to express. Yet here the poet has found a way. --Kenneth Kimmel Jungian Psychoanalyst Eros and the Shattering Gaze Transcending Narcissism

The suspense of childhood, the hypnotized waiting for an exit from it and its moody gods the parents, the indenture of it, along with its bliss: Joan Fiset fits marvels of doubt and ecstasy into a paragraph. The mother's story here, blurred in the eye of a child already a poet, is a masterpiece...Namesake is one of the most vivid and moving memoirs I have ever read. --Valerie Trueblood Search Party

About this edition

• Publisher: Blue Begonia Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0911287744
• ISBN 13: 9780911287745
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 162