Other Times, Midnight

Auteur

Andrea (Read) Ballou's poems have appeared most recently in Barrow Street, Black Rabbit Quarterly, Copper Nickel, FIELD, Goliad, Lily Poetry Review, Plume, The Missouri Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. She earned her PhD from the University of Chicago in Romance Languages and Literatures and an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she is the recipient of a National Resource Fellowship, a Tinker Foundation Grant, and an Artist's Fellowship from the Somerville Arts Council. Andrea has taught creative writing and literature at numerous universities and colleges and currently facilitates the Poetry Lab at the VNA Senior Living at Highland in Somerville and serves on the board of the Somerville Arts Council. She divides her time between Somerville, Massachusetts and Brooks, Maine.

Texte du rabat

In Other Times, Midnight, her debut collection, Andrea Ballou explores the aftermath of loss-death, divorce, and departures-and asks the toughest questions: how do we contend with grief and remorse, and where does the spirit go to wait out trauma? Ballou's poems fight our "impulse to not speak," aware that naming, and that speech itself, is a matter of life and death. Her startling and often humorous images rooted in the fields, forests and domesticity of rural life are juxtaposed with oblique, at times irreverent, adaptations of Celtic and Greek myth and biblical stories. For Ballou, language is both tool and weapon, as useful and durable as a hoe, wheelbarrow, sword, thread. Caught "in the mouth of midnight," these poems wrestle with the numinous, their voices-cranky and cajoling, always compassionate and vulnerable-urging us toward the fullness of being human, daring us, despite it all, to love again.