Description
Poetry. TILLER NORTH takes us behind the walls of a fishing village in coastal Maine. With her insider's voice, Rosa Lane breaks the code of silence in her telling: secrets embedded within class, sexual identity, familial relationships, death, and rebirth. "I once said I would not look back," Lane tells us toward the end of TILLER NORTH, but how grateful we are that she has, opening a world for us where she learned to listen not just for the cry of the loon, but also the rhythms of boats in water, bamboo flutes, the "rusty jaw" of the mailbox, June bugs that "bomb / the porch light with spiny legs," and all the sounds that accompany Maine's harsh winters and lush summers. But we don't just hear this world: Lane makes us see it, with one stunning image after another. From the ghost of a horse in a collapsed barn to her father who "stitches the backyard" when he returns from death as a hummingbird, the poems are so richly observed that by the end, all we want is to look back, again and again.
Author Bio
Rosa Lane is a native of coastal Maine, with familial and ancestral roots in lobster fishing. She earned her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is the author of the poetry chapbook Roots and Reckonings (Granite Press, East, 1980). Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including The Briar Cliff Review, Crab Orchard Review, New South, and Ploughshares. After earning her second Masters degree and a PhD in sustainable architecture from UC Berkeley, Lane works as an architect and divides her time between coastal Maine and the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her partner.
Author City: OAKLAND, CA USA