A Neighborhood Changes by Julia Nunnally Duncan

Julia Duncan‘s A Neighborhood Changes is a beautifully lyric lament for all that evanesces, yet a celebration of memory’s dogged insistence that the past and that which vanishes lives often more vibrantly, if elegiacally, on the page. Poem after poem, Duncan soulfully choreographs the labyrinth of memory, how it stores and catalogs with regret and glory, how language—the poem itself—is the necessary province of the past. These poems wonderfully showcase Duncan’s marvelous, subtle facility with rhyme, and a sonic authority that renders each inimitable. A Neighborhood Changes, with its stirring, often heartbreaking, portraiture, puts one in mind of Spoon River Anthology, even Wineburg, Ohio. These are such finely crafted poems, the plat of recollection we tread, along with Duncan, as “She continues to point at this and that, / telling [us] stories about her past.” –

-Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-2014)