Addendum: Reviewed in the North American Review!

"The Epiphany of Blue: A Review of John Linstrom's To Leave for Our Own Country" by Marco Wilkinson

On Earth Day, I posted about my poetry book’s imminent one-year birthday and how to get a signed copy from me for just $15 to celebrate. That birthday is today, and I’m happy now to be able to also share that To Leave for Our Own Country has been reviewed by the poet Marco Wilkinson for North American Review! Two of the book’s poems first appeared in North American Review, one in the print edition and another on their online “Open Space” platform that now hosts Marco’s review. I’m grateful for this full-circle moment.

My deep thanks go to Marco, a lovely person and beautiful essayist who I was very lucky to meet in Joe Wilkins’s nonfiction workshop at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference years ago, for the close and sensitive reading of my book. Here’s a little taste:

At the heart of the entire collection is this unnamed thing that blows through Linstrom’s experiences and his poems, the paradox that what threatens change (the wind blowing through the errant open window) and the need to leave the status quo behind is also the thread that binds and pulls forward, that draws one to “come home” to something new.

Again, you can read the full review essay here.

If you enjoy the review and you’ve already ordered a signed and discounted copy of my book (for yourself—and additional copies for friends and family!), please also consider ordering a copy of Marco’s exquisite, lyrical memoir, Madder: A Memoir in Weeds, which Lia Purpura described as an “utterly gorgeous, learned, tender treatise on kinship and the ecology of memory.” My copy has been beckoning to me for months—a call to which I’ve sometimes submitted, covertly stealing moments to poke my nose in at random, enjoying it in snatches—and I look forward to some time this summer, on my first real break in years, to read it through, perhaps in the shade of a tree in our wild and weedy backyard.

Thanks for taking a look at two updates in one week. I promise a little break from posting now, as I work through the final spring grading, and hope to share some less self-promotional writing this summer. If you subscribe to this newsletter/blog/thing that I’ve begun and you’d like to help more people find it, perhaps you could use the button below to share it with your circles. Wherever you are reading this from, I wish you good weather, and I hope that you and your people are finding and sharing shelter in these times of storm.