Sneaker-clad clerks racing for the commuter train, a boy named Jackpot, Karen Carpenter and Led Zeppelin, a child's Mr. Potato Head with eyes where arms should be, a two-year old's prized word collection — Cheryl Dumesnil's poems flash with telling details. Winner of the 2008 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, her collection of narratives celebrates the risks we take in living.
For example, in "Bernal Heights" (featured on Verse Daily) we hear Jackpot's "song of luck."
In "A Soldier's Home, Hughes, Arkansas, 1970," Dumesnil writes about a photograph taken long ago:
...the solder's creased shoulders
wait to grow chevrons, inverted V's
flying upward, out of this place.
And the title poem can be read in its entirety on the author's website.
But it was the structure of the collection that intrigued me. She divides her poems into four sections, an organizing strategy that can make it seem predictable. But as the title states, this is a book about falling. And there is a suggestion of call and response; falls are always succeeded by getting back up. This is a praise song for resilience.
