Odd Nest by Dom Fonce

If Faulkner had hung out with his grandmother and wrote poems in her voice about her painful, mystical, inhospitable small town and youth, and together they retroactively created the Southern literary ancestor of My Life by Lyn Hejinian, you’d have Dom Fonce’s Odd Nest. Written based on conversations with his grandmother Patricia, Fonce pries the mercurial seeing of his grandmother, her oracular recall, and shows the full lyricism of her spirit traveling across the decades. Reading this book, you will find yourself staring at a tree, marveling at line after line, and recognizing in Fonce’s syntax the broken nature not only of his great grandfather who tormented Patricia, but a deep analogy for the spirit of our nation: “a ghost, pepper-tongued, spitting violent silence into the dark, alone.” 

–Cindy Arrieu-King, author of The Betweens 

Oracle poet, holding space for sorrow and celebration of life and days and leaning into the regret of it all, “I mouth the words I wish I’d said to you.” Odd Nest is a marvelous collection of poems, and I want to share it with everyone who loves the spaces such poetry can create inside us! Thank you, Dear Poet! 

–CAConrad, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return 

Dom Fonce’s poetry collection Odd Nest is a riveting character study delivered via threads of ancestral wisdom. In these lyrically intense persona poems, omens hover in the thicket, loom at the bottom of our coffee cup, and swoop down from the sky, transmitting knowledge that haunts as it enlightens. Readers journey with the main character over the course of her lifetime, experiencing hardship, desire, grief, and astonishing joy. Rooted in epiphany within a resilient natural landscape, the poems of Odd Nest feel like unraveling our own family history as “One-hundred blackbirds / watch us // from the branches above.” 

 —Mary Biddinger, author of The Girl with the Black Lipstick and Department of Elegy