About this item
Highlights
- Daughters of Bone explores the landscapes and people of the South.
- Author(s): Jessica Temple
- 84 Pages
- Poetry, American
Description
Book Synopsis
Daughters of Bone explores the landscapes and people of the South. Drawing on personal and collective history, these poems explore the relationships between place, people, history, culture, and language. At the center are family and relationships, especially between women of different generations, grief and loss, and travel and return. This collection questions the meaning of "home" and mythologizes Temple's own history as she searches for her place within it.
Review Quotes
Daughters of Bone strikes me as a claiming: of self, of personal history, and of the voice to speak of these things. Few poets have the ability to simultaneously evoke the particularities of their own lives and draw a reader in to make it hers as well, but Jessica Temple made me feel welcome, at home in these poems. I know these women, and I know these places. Temple's intense engagement with words and their histories reveals how we make the world with the stories we tell, and with the beauty of their telling.
-Jennifer Horne, Poet Laureate of Alabama, 2017-present
and author of Borrowed Light, Little Wanderer, and Bottle Tree
The South is both a place and a feeling, and Jessica Temple constructs that entity on the page with a raw and curious eye in Daughters of Bone. The lost mother, questions of family lineage, and even a dip into Grimm folklore make up some of this book's themes, which feel all at once like memoir and verse. Temple's willingness to see her South and her life with poetic finesse is well worth the read!
-Ashley M. Jones, author of dark / / thing and Magic City Gospel
Jessica Temple's poetry demonstrates an expansive energy and a soulful joy, the eternal issues of sorrow and death, as well as an impressive representation of place, family, and nature. Her language and consciousness render an unmistakeable and beautiful poetic voice. Again and again, there are striking lines of aural delight.
-Sue Walker, Poet Laureate of Alabama, 2003-2012, editor and publisher
of Negative Capability, and author of Blood Will Bear Your Name