Owning the Moon

Description

In her final poetry collection, Linda Sillitoe transforms ordinary events into thoughtful, funny, and sharp commentaries on the human condition. A mother painstakingly alters a dress for a beloved daughter, and the “cloth and needle weave her daughter’s dreams.” Later a daughter mourning her father’s death remembers how “something vital vanished.”

From warning a friend against growing “spoiled just a bit for ordinary men” to trying  to “fit this time among our dearest and darkest demons” after moving back to Utah, Sillitoe reveals a world “where poems hold such power,” and each stanza carries multiple meanings.

Despite, or perhaps in conjunction with, life’s joy and sorrow, Sillitoe’s verses reveal an unconventional spirit determined to transcribe life’s experiences in a manner that is both accessible and extraordinary, ending with a promise to continue “scribbling warranties in the sand./Over time, we lose what we own/ and learn the motions that bring it back—/like this moon, as caught, as wild, as we.”