Migration

EXCERPT

All the time I lived in that house
the kitchen table never did listen
to the knife blade. I let my watch fall
into the same glass bowl every day
but it never helped.
//
We tried not to break the good dishes,
and yet we did, again and again,
while Mother was picking okra
or stringing beef along a wire in the yard.

PRAISE
The poems in Ginny Wiehardt’s Migration chart a gestural arc of movement that begins in a shotgun country house and leads to Brooklyn, a passage that starts in the hermetic closeness of a family clan and expands into the vertiginous flux of new parenthood. By turns lyrical and anecdotal, dreamy and ambivalent, Wiehardt’s poems rove a landscape restless with spiky mementos, eerie portents, and a strange untethered grace. Or as one poem offers: “Somewhere geese were tearing away, / honking to the others, keep up.”

—Anna Journey, judge of the 2015 Poetry Chapbook Competition

Ginny Wiehardt’s poetry has been published in Bellingham Review, Crab Orchard Review, Southern Humanities Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Willow Springs. She has an MFA in Poetry from the Michener Center for Writers and has been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook and Jentel. Originally from Texas, she now lives in New York City with her family.

Book design by SoYun Cho.

LINKS/NEWS

Review in American Microreviews & Interviews

Interview in It's Lit

Poem featured at Poetry Daily

Interview in Speaking of Marvels