Chapbook, 30 x 36″ when unfolded, folds down like a map, with coffee cup prints on the cover. Yellow or white paper.
Price: $9.00
ISBN: 978-1-888553-35-2
“Stephanie Balzer’s book of poems is masterful and transporting in its form and in its orchestration of themes. Her handling of the prose poem form transforms the prose “box” into a playground, a diorama. The reader enters the speaker’s imagination of a woman rents a house in a scraggly desert neighborhood as she is absorbed into the vacated rooms of the previous tenant who killed someone before moving out. This tenant and the person he killed are, in turns, the Revenant of the title, the ghost who haunts the speaker, the reader, the book. In this we are confronted with the inner life of a seer, one who survives by way of lyrical resonances with the quotidian human world, one who finds meaning and merit in the other desert we deal with, the stark, often vacated world of faded blue fence, scientific information, weather, groceries, and work. There is humor here, a lively imagination–surprise, movement, heart, heat. Here the caring for others emerges in the desert slowly, as surely and as necessary as the rain. This is a work in which a recognizable local landscape is transformed through the medium of poetry, and we are elsewhere, and grateful, for it.” —Barbara Cully