A Girl, Her Slipper, and Yesterday's Rainbow (Paperback or Softback)

Designer's Choice, The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2024

A Girl, Her Slipper, and Yesterday's Rainbow explores escape and memory. Discovering no Cinderella footwear in the alcoholic environment of growing up, a girl runs off to the freestyle chaos of the 1970s before seeking asylum in quiet country living. After her husband's death, she retreats to the city but discovers you can't hide from memories. With acceptance and humor, these poetic musings paint experiences familiar to so many.

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With a keen eye for detail and a voice that resonates in both its tenderness and rebellion, Thorpe invites readers through the field of my history, yesterday's rainbow a riot of weeds. ... [Her] vivid language brings to life a place where memories rise like party balloons, a testament to the power of place in shaping identity and the pull between "home" and our wider worlds.

-Shaun Turner, poet and editor

A Girl, Her Slipper, and Yesterday's Rainbow balances on the palpable tension between a life tethered to family and its messiness and the untethered life of free-spirited and unpredictable adventure, bringing the book its energy and its dramatic core. The surprising anecdotes, the inventive language, the speaker's honesty, all these give these poems an almost supernatural quality, balancing the reader on the virtual tightrope of life.

-Nancy K. Jentsch, author of Between the Rows

Through A Girl, Her Slipper, and Yesterday's Rainbow, we take a journey alongside a girl who is the daughter of a father who was captain of the drink/ A flagging ship in a whiskey sea and a mother who snuck Newports and danced to Billie Holliday with arms fluid as liquid persuasion. Thorpe's masterful use of the organic transforms the inexplicable-but highly relatable-into something I could touch and, more importantly, feel deeply.

-Missy Brownson, author of Hush Candy

Sylvia Ahrens (writing as Allison Thorpe) grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan. After adventuring around the country, she and her husband settled at the end of a lovely dirt road in Kentucky where they built their own home of natural stone and wood, raised a family and an organic garden, and reveled in bird song for almost four decades. Along the way, she earned degrees in English Literature, Creative Writing, and Women's Studies. Her books include six collections of poetry and a series of cozy mysteries. Inspirations include the growly screams of Janis Joplin, the enduring courage of Aung San Suu Kyi, the complex melodies of Bela Fleck, and the beautiful finality of the Oxford Comma. She works as a writing mentor at The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, loves lilacs, yearns to be a poker star, and lives in Lexington, Kentucky.