Transported by Ellen Roberts Young

Ellen Young‘s new and evocative collection of poems,TRANSPORTED,  begins with her father’s 1956 Fulbright grant to study in Egypt, her family’s travels there and through Europe, and later her returns with her own children.

Poems that dive into meditation, history, travel, memory, and attempts at understanding the rich complications of the heart.

                    the click of stiletto heels on

                    terrazo, or the tiny lizard

                    in the Villa d’Este garden

                    hooked to my chain of memory

                             (from Charmed)

Finely written, these poems do not disappoint.

—Joanne Townsend, former Alaska poet laureate

“For an American child visiting Cairo or Rome or Paris in the 1950s, a bag of peanuts sold to feed pigeons, or a tiny lizard in a Roman garden, may impress as wondrously as the giant stones of a Pyramid. Ellen Young’s poems treat us to that child’s-eye-view of the places she traversed in her youth, and also to the adult ruminations they — and later journeys — inspired. In one poem, she “inhaled dust lifting from old marble in the Forum” and in another, that very dust of her travels became “domiciled in the gut, the lungs,” forming a microbiome of memories that she has carried in her psyche and her body forever. These are deeply personal lyrics, and reading them — like looking at a friend’s old photo album — leaves us not just with images of foreign streets, but with the insights of a writer as a child, teenager, sister, student, librarian, wife, mother. Most of all, they leave us with the insights of a fine poet.”

–Leora Zeitlin, Zephyr Press