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Two Emilys: Poems
by Andrea Potos
30 Poems ~ 47 pages
Price: $17.00 ~ Paperback
Format: 6 x 9 ~ Perfect Bound
Publisher: Kelsay Books
ISBN: 978-1-63980-687-4
To Order: Amazon.com
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Andrea Potos and Kelsay Books continue to publish innovative contributions to the world of poetry. Potos’s treatment of these two incomparable poets, (separated by an ocean), is fresh and innovative. One senses a kinship of the heart between all three poets.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
In Two Emilys, Dickinson and Brontë meet in the memory and imagination of a master poet. Potos evokes these writers–contemporaries living across the Atlantic from one another–as muses and mentors, following in Brontë’s steps across the moors, their “wuthering skies”, “the gorse / grazing my ankles as I go.” And we are there with her, blown about by the wind that “is wider up there”, where the “moor air / erases your every last edge”. At the Emily Dickinson Museum, Potos wonders “how would it be to live / in the aftermath of her? Would she guide / my hand across the modern page?” One is tempted to say yes. Potos daringly takes up the challenge of situating herself among the greatest writers of their age and succeeds brilliantly.
–Judith Sornberger, author of The Sorority of Stillness: A Gallery of Women in Art and I Call to You from Time
Andrea Potos invites us to join writers in a quiet Amherst bedroom, or fields where wind erases the edges of heather and gorse–or to be delighted by remembered poets in a mall, a gym or a movie theater. In these poems, time beautifully splits, like light through a chandelier or a glass doorknob.
–Jeannine Atkins, author of Green Promises: Girls Who Loved the Earth and Borrowed Names: Poems About Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C.J. Walker, Marie Curie and their Daughters
A literature lover’s dream! Through dream, letter, history, travel, memory and pure imagi-nation, we enter the real and literary lives of not only two Emilys, but also an Andrea. I love the weaving in of familiar themes and language–from the moor and gorse to the white gown and the Amherst home–plus there are plenty of surprises! It’s a joy of a collection to read–a playful, soulful honoring of two writers who changed the ways we see the world.
–Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of The Unfolding and host of The Poetic Path
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Andrea Potos is the author of seven full-length poetry collections, and most recently Her Joy Becomes (Fernwood Press) and Marrow of Summer (Kelsay Books)> A new collection from Fernwood Press entitled The Presence of One Word will be published in 2025.
She is the recipient of five Outstanding Achievement Awards in Poetry from the Wisconsin Library Association and the James Hearst Poetry Prize from the North American Review.
Andrea’s poems are published online and in print, including in The Sun, One Art, Midwest Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Poem, Poetry East, Braided Way, Potomac Review, and three anthologies from Storey Publishing, including How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. Her new website: https://andreapotos.com
She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
FROM THE BOOK:
Studio Sessions,
Emily Dickinson Museum
by Andrea Potos
This is a mighty room
within its precincts hopes have played.
–E.D.
Two hundred dollars for one hour
may be nothing for the chance
to sit (given one small table and chair)
breathing the air of her room.
Surely some atoms of her being still
linger, though the counterpane
would be new, the lace curtains
pristinely laundered since her touch.
With only pencil and paper (no touching
of the furnishings allowed), how would it be to live
in the aftermath of her? Would she guide
my hand across the modern page?
Could I float along the lost thermals
of her thought? Would ambition keep me
stalled, forgetting how it was
the nobodies she favored.
Brontë Hour
by Andrea Potos
outside the rain-
darkened stones, mist
seeping
through wool
and skin,
inside the fire
speaking sparks,
tossing amber
onto the page
weighted with stories
invisible in air.
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