The Next Syllable

The Newest Syllable is an autobiography told entirely in poems, which is to say it is a book about the self as something that takes a lifetime to excavate rather than a thing you simply are.

Fifty poems move through the span of one woman's life, from before birth to the present day, asking the same question at every age: what is real about me, and what is artifice?

The answer keeps changing. That is the point. Maybe that is always the point of poetry.

There is a voice that runs through this collection like a thread you don't quite see until you're holding the end of it. It calls the speaker little one. It says not yet in the early years, and now at the threshold of adulthood, and finally, in the later poems, something more like soon. By the time the reader recognizes the voice, they may also recognize it as their own.

The poems move through childhood shaped by chaos and the library as escape, through the particular loneliness of growing up gifted and hungry in a house that couldn't hold either, through first loves and first losses, through the long unraveling of an identity built from borrowed pieces, through the building of something sturdier from the rubble. There is a direct encounter with God at a party. There is the strange dignity of deathbed scenes. There is the moment a woman steps into a house that is entirely her own. There is the slow, hard-won arrival at solitude as something other than loss.

The later poems do not resolve into certainty. They resolve into comfort with uncertainty, which is a different and more durable thing.

The Newest Syllable is for anyone who has felt the distance between who they were taught to be and who they actually are, and who is still, at whatever age, in the act of closing it.