CLOSE ENCOUNTERS Down Home by Pamela Yenser

“Everything abandoned comes alive” Pamela Yenser writes in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS Down Home, which becomes an invocation for resilience in a world filled with disaster at every turn: whether it’s the wreckage of flying saucers in Roswell, or a brother and a mother who are irrevocably changed after a complicated birth, or an abusive father who is always in the driver’s seat—whether it’s by plane or car. Yenser does the difficult work of reckoning with trauma and the “family / history slamming the lid on truth.” And though there’s comfort in escape, and beauty to be found in the landscapes these poems traverse in a wide range of traditional and open poetic forms, Yenser reminds us “As long as you live / you won’t forget,” and there’s danger everywhere. Lucky for us, we have a wonderful guide who knows her way around language and line, and is cunning enough to “have razor blades sewn / into the hem of every poem.”
—Gary Jackson, author of Missing You, Metropolis (Graywolf Press, 2010),  selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as winner of the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He teaches in the MFA program at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina.

Pamela Yenser is a learned poet who knows the context, history, and texts of literature. Here she uses her supple and strict prosody to tell a family story about an abusive, daredevil father, a denying-praying mother, her “little retarded brother” (“She is her brother’s keeper”) and more. In airplanes and Airstream trailers “one catastrophe after another” happens to mark a childhood where “Visions of the devil / made you tithe, trade in the family silver.” This astonishing chapbook delivers one revelation after another in poems exquisitely structured: “The past is a trap the Jaws of Life / can’t break,” she writes, “… but isn’t this the work a poet is meant to do?” One poem in exact rhyming couplets is called “In the Garden of Demented Parents.” Another, also in couplets, ends: “Look! I have razor blades sewn / into the hem of every poem.” Read this brilliant and triumphant chapbook by a poet who limns the tragedy and triumph of her life.
–Hilda Raz, author of numerous poetry books, including List & Story (Stephen F. Austin U. Press, 2020)  and Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been, New and Collected Poems, 1986-2020 (University of  Nebraska Press, 2021).

Pamela Yenser‘s brave and tender poems spin together family history, personal resilience, and imaginative perseverance “sharp as that wreckage/ strewn like tinsel on glitter-/fields of tumbled rock” (as she writes in the title poem). Encompassing everything from a “bad weather balloon made of Kryptonite” to “a pineapple/ ruffled doily,” Yenser juxtaposes the images and dreams of the otherworldly and the day-to-day life while also writing deeply of love and survival, monsters and angels, magic tricks and memories. This is a captivating and sparkling collection.
–Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Kansas Poet Laureate Emerita, author of How Time Moves: New & Selected Poems (Meadowlark Press, 2020).

Pamela Yenser’s CLOSE ENCOUNTERS refers to, yes, the Roswell UFO, as well as family relationships that are a parallel encounter. The poems’ narrator sees the flying saucer wreckage as a four-year-old. She writes about this iconic disruption of the skies as a way to reveal the workings of memory itself. This is an exciting personal fable that blends journalism, verse, and narration.
–Denise Lowe, author of Shadow Light (Red Mountain Press Award, 2018).

“Old Fruit of the Loom,” Pamela Yenser writes of an abusive father. Also, please find a brain-damaged brother who pronounces death, “debt,” and a mother in denial of it all, dazed by religion. Whether flying over wreckage of a flying saucer or driving down Route 66 in search of a neon sign of “a lady bent in two,” this family does not travel well. In CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, Ms Yenser uses a dazzling array of forms to probe the dark corners of her subject. In the mode of Sylvia Plath, she mocks her nightmares, but goes beyond the so-called “Confessionals” to explore an entire culture of obsession. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS Down Home is a brave book by an expert writer who shines a light “because that’s what poets do.”
–Murray Moulding, a surrealist Colorado poet, and author of Moon Over Easy (Buzzard Press, 2009).

Pamela Yenser delves into the murky depths of familial tension and childhood mythology to uncover a wry history of UFOs, a father’s questionable motives, and unexpected perspectives of the varied
landscapes of Kansas and New Mexico. These poems are powered by succinct verses, apt metaphors, and surprising images that together weave a dynamic and irresistible collection that must be read again and again. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS Down Home is a brave book by an expert writer who shines a light “because that’s what poets do.”
–Lisa Hase-Jackson, author of Flint & Fire (Word Works, 2019).

The poems in Pamela Yenser’s CLOSE ENCOUNTERS Down Home make a kind of memoir of growing up under the thumb of an abusive father and detached mother. They are disturbing poems in beautiful wrapping, sonically pleasing, vivid, and carefully crafted. The book’s final poem, Damn, il pleut” is a masterful seven-section poem that leads readers from the speaker’s infancy through the growing-up years and beyond, to the death of her father, when she is at last free. It’s a bittersweet telling that begins and ends with a wish for a real father, someone he never managed to be; the final question’s answer never comes, though by now readers know the answer never could have been a simple yes: “Wasn’t I just your baby, then, in the old days, at the war’s end?”
–Rebecca Aronson, author of Anchor (Orison Books, 2021), Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom (winner of Orison Books Poetry Prize, 2016), and Creature, Creature (Winner of the Main-Traveled Roads Poetry Book Prize, 2007).