Joanne Harris Allred takes her title from a line by Swedish poet Tomas Transtr�mer, the Nobel Laureate known for his precise and enigmatic imagery. Her poems also rely on precise imagery and description, and though less enigmatic, they can be deeply profound. The poem she borrows from is called "Elegy," which seems appropriate since this collection contains a number of informal elegies for parents, friends, siblings, pets, and even her younger selves. Her theme is revealed in the first poem, "Small Gifts," which ends:
Yes, I know matter is transient, only on loan for a spell.
Wordsworth said we find strength in what remains, the shell
of memory, a philosophic mind. And nature picks up the slack,
fills any vacuum: an ocean of things taken, small gifts given back.
In a life of steady losses, how do we find-how do we recognize-the sustaining gifts that the world can provide for us? These twentyfour poems are her attempt to answer this question that haunts the introspective soul. For me, they gleam with bursts of joy in the darkness we drink daily.
-Gary Thompson, author of Broken by Water: Salish Sea Years
In Friends, You Drank Some Darkness, Joanne Harris Allred writes poems that are both earthbound and mystical, exploring the "dueling imperatives" of our lives where we "attend to/the fleshy, material instant" while trying "to stay alert for...a glimpse of what's beyond." In these pages, there is the whole freight of a fully lived life, a season of her twenties when she "stripped to raw abandon" and "only the wild moment mattered." A winter, when she "was a leaf caught / in an eddy" and "even now...can't name what emerged." We go on journeys with friends and family, we discover places of great beauty where "the soul converses only in radiance." We descend into "death's grotto" to "hear/the drip of a spring hidden deeper, / like the plink of piano keys..." and time is an "impeccably dressed heartless killer." This book brings gifts of sound, wisdom, and humor. This is a book to savor.
-Susan Browne, author of Monster Mash
Allred, Joanne Harris: - Joanne Harris Allred is the author of four previous poetry collections: Particulate (Bear Star Press), The Evolutionary Purpose of Heartbreak (Turning Point Press), Outside Paradise (Word Poetry Press), and Whetstone, which won the Flume Press Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in many publications including Women's Review of Books, Prairie Schooner and Quarterly West. She was born and spent her early years in Salt Lake City, Utah, but has lived most of her adult years in Northern California where she taught in the English department at California State University, Chico. With her husband, Jerry, three children, many dogs, and several iterations of chicken flocks, along with a lush companionship of wildlife, she lived many years in Butte Creek Canyon outside Chico. Their home here burned in November 2018 in the"Camp Fire." Outside Paradise chronicles the experience of losing most everything in the fire and beginning again. She now splits her time between a coastal community in Humboldt County, California, and Butte Creek Canyon. The landscapes of both places inspire, backdrop, and are often the subject of her poems.
