Winter Sharp with Apples
by Annette Sisson
45 Poems ~ 103 pages
Format: 6 x 6 ~ Perfect Bound ~ Paperback
Price: $15.89
Publisher: Terrapin Books
ISBN: 978-1-947896-75-8
To Order: Amazon.com
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In one of his poems Wallace Stevens has this to say about winter, “It is still full of icy shades, and shapen snow.” In other poems Stevens observes the “irresistible” lusciousness of various kinds of fruit. Winter Sharp with Apples, by Annette Sisson, treats readers to seasonal realities of the heart. Truths that meet us where we live. There is a poem here for every season of life.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
In Winter Sharp with Apples, Annette Sisson's poetic gifts are on full display. Her language is crisp and clean-a readability that's instructive, a readability rich with emotional and intellectual pleasures. I often found myself delighted by a line or an image, then felt myself pulled into a nexus of thinking and feeling. Her language is layered, resonant. Her gaze is attentive to the natural world and family. But she knows that the natural world has cycles; time will diminish flesh and bonds. Her poems summon forth the intimacies that illuminate, that shape our lives. Sisson is a marvelous poet. Her poems-deftly built, deeply felt-remind us love is what endures.
–Eduardo C. Corral, Guillotine (2020)
In Winter Sharp with Apples, poet Annette Sisson practices a graceful seeing in layers that bespeak a marvelous intelligence and curious mind–such care in language, such attentiveness to the earth’s inhabitants, to the solemn measures and joyful costs of human actions. Here are thick-woven observations that leave me awed by the depth of their attendant wisdom.
–Major Jackson, Razzle Dazzle (2023)
In Annette Sisson’s luminous collection, there are seasons of dying. A mother’s cancer “shrouds / the windowpanes” and a daughter’s illness hits like the “joists of a house folding in.” Yet the salve for hurt, for the loss of loved ones, and for this wounded world lies in Sisson’s deep sense of mothering–of children, parents, memories, and the land. With language that is bright and pungent, her poems become celebrations of nature’s robust beauty and the transcendence of human love. Winter Sharp with Apples lyrically insists that “we find each other among the trees– / leaf on leaf, skin on skin.” This is a collection to return to season after season after season.
–Heidi Seaborn, Marilyn: Essays & Poems (2022)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Annette Sisson is the author of Small Fish in High Branches, published by GlassLyre (2022). Her poems have been published in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Rust & Moth, Lascaux Review, and elsewhere. She won The Porch Writers Collective’s 2019 Poetry Prize. She is Professor of English at Belmont University and lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
FROM THE BOOK:
First Coffee
by Annette Sissoon
In the kitchen, housecoat barely
tied, she waits for water
to boil. First coffee
of her sixty-sixth year.
Time drifts, dust
coils in shafts of light.
At six months her grandson
squeals, scoots himself
across the floor. She wonders
if her next car will pass
to him, a teen, as she
barters for rides–doctor,
pharmacy, grocery store–
her sons, fifty by then,
one bald as a newborn,
the other silver-gray.
Coffee filtered, she watches
the splotch of milk expand,
fade, sips gently
to steady the clock in her head–
ponders how long
her shoulders will swivel, flex
to stroke the baby’s back
as he slides into swales of sleep.
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