Domesticated by Jamie Lynn Heller

These poems recover the ephemera of domestic life and reveal them as moments that resist evanescence. Heller ably captures and sums up domesticity in all its subsurface tensions, overt humor, and unsuspected beauty.

Andrés Rodríguez, author of Night Song and Book of the Heart

Jamie Lynn Heller invites us into her home, room by room, front yard to back yard. She hasn’t cleaned ahead. She opens her door on any given day. She isn’t shy. In the kitchen, the laundry room, the bedroom, we find familiar truths. Heller recognizes tedium, but never boredom, loss, but never despair. Her poems smile and laugh. They cry. She finds meaning in a forgotten hat and a broken childproof lock, the “plop of the daily mail” and the “heat from the toaster.” Heller uses her poet’s eye to move us across the threshold. In her home, as in her poems, we recognize ourselves.

Al Ortolani, author of Slow Stirring Spoon, The Last Hippie of Camp 50, Finding the Edge and Wren’s House

Jamie Lynn Heller captures ordinary objects and everyday moments in humorous, heartstring-
tugging, and often breathtakingly tender imagery. The kitchen counter becomes “the pin point
our lives spin around,” interrupted conversations are “tangled balls” to await unraveling, and a
head of lettuce becomes a love “offering/wrapped in pale green leaves.” Anyone who’s juggled
career, parenthood, and keeping romance alive in a household full of attention-demanding
chores will instantly identify with – and appreciate the insights of –Heller’s poetic portrayal of
contemporary domestic life.

Maril Crabtree, author of Dancing with Elvis, Moving On, and Tying the Light.

Author Bio: Detailed Bio:
Jamie Lynn Heller grew up in Kansas City, Missouri and Lawrence, Kansas. She earned her bachelor’s in Secondary Education from Kansas State University and a Masters in Guidance Counseling from the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
She has pieces published or accepted at Prairie Schooner, The Main Street Rag, Tule Review, Noctua Review, Gargoyle, Earth’s Daughters, Iodine Poetry Journal, Flint Hills Review, I-70 review, Avocet, Storyteller Magazine, Little Balkans Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Diversion Press, KC Voices Magazine Volume 8, KC Parent Magazine, The Whirlybird Anthology of Kansas City Writers, To the Stars Through Difficulties: A Kansas Regna in 150 Voices, Whispering Prairie Press Writing Contest Honorable Mention Poetry 2012, Kansas Voices Contest Honorable Mention Summer 2011, and Because I said so: Poems on the Happiness and Crappiness of Parenthood. For a complete list of publications and additional poems see www.jamielynnheller.blogspot.com

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]