daddy closet by CD Nelsen

$14.99

 

Galway Kinnell once admonished poets to sing, sing, sing, so I believe he’d be pleased with poems by CD Nelsen. Original, musical, the deliciously, ominously-titled daddy closet is a volume by a narrative poet who loves words, a lyric poet who loves a story, an American poet now, like Walt Whitman then, describing a world he couldn’t imagine; macrobiotics at a roadside diner; an aging fake clam in a mini-golf course by a fabled nuclear reactor, so near and so far from the sea. Whether unwound cassette tapes, road-struck coyotes, beheaded journalists or inedible Blackberries, CD Nelsen celebrates and grieves the contemporary world.

–D M Gordon, Nightly, At the Institute Of the Possible

 

 

In fractured images from a deep, emotional and philosophical wellspring, CD Nelsen has created  this astonishing book of wildly original poems. Human beings are so frightened, says J. Krishnamurti “on a grainy video” from 1976. “Oh, yeah.” says the narrator of daddy closet. And  a child, confused and “too young to know I know where water over rocks can go,” abides with a father, charismatic and frightening, a self-professed “world’s oldest teenage werewolf.” Escaping  dragons of every kind, she rises to thrust her fist in the face of death, saying, “haha lifesucker, another spring has sprung & I/just climbed Monument Mountain in the rain &/finished the novel of 5 years & cleaned/ the garbage/down the road so//not ready yet. give me/a few more years. The hope throughout is rooted in the natural world, how we, like trees “anchored deep in earth/SURVIVE dry/wet, cold/hot/wind/stillness/pestilence/maniac poisoner/….”/we come up “bare or lush with LEAVES/sometimes FLOWERS/ sometimes even FRUIT”//

 

For an inspired journey through courageous, fear-shattering poems, read this book.

–Patricia Lee Lewis, A Kind of Yellow and High Lonesome, Patchwork Farm Writing Retreats

 

CD Nelsen is an irreverent original. A natural storyteller, she makes richly detailed, action-filled poems. They span her childhood where she “grew up hot as hell, in humid petrochemical Houston where Janis Joplin’s voice got its wail” to recent stories of a terrifying hawk or a huge old bull seal on a beach.

–Karen Chase, Jamali Kamali, Polio Boulevard

 

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Description

daddy closet

by CD Nelsen

$14.99, paper

978-1-63534-410-3

2018

CD (Cheryl Diane) Nelsen considers herself to be tricoastal: she grew up on The Gulf Coast, Houston and Austin TX.  She moved to The Oregon Coast in her mid 20s where she read her poetry to an audience for the first time and was published in Total Abandon which nominated her for a Pushcart Prize. She’s been East Coast, in Western Massachusetts, a writing and lit teacher for over 3 decades. Her poetry has been published in The Berkshire Review, Patchwork Farm Journal, Potlatcxh, Greenfield Review, Salome: A Literary Dance Magazine, Third Berkshire Anthology, Tightrope #9, and other journals. She co-authored a best-selling book, Food Trips and Traps and has made it to the final four in WORDXWORD story slams the last two years.

 

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