Our Family Tree and Other Myths To pay by check please use this order form. We are pleased to take orders from retailers. Email us with details about your order or call us at 207-837-5760. Having researched her own family tree, poet Jean LeBlanc ended up with more questions than answers. The poems in Our Family Tree and Other Myths are based on both real and imagined events woven together to present a story of family that addresses many of the mysteries that remain after our forebears have taken their secrets to their graves. POETRY / General ISBN: 978-1-971191-08-9 (print; softcover; perfect bound) 74 pages |
|
|
|
|
|
“Jean LeBlanc warns us at the beginning of Our Family Tree and Other Myths, her second collection of poetry for Shanti Arts, not to assume these explorations along the ‘ever-shifting borderlands between memory and imagination’ are autobiographical. Instead, she asks us to relate the clues in these exquisite poems to our own families, and to wonder ‘how did she know’ . . . our feeling that we certainly don’t belong in the family we ended up in. (Don’t worry, LeBlanc reassures, ‘You understand it might not have been a bad thing, being switched at birth.’) . . . ‘losing’ a mother when ‘she finds the unlocked door to the side parking lot’ and flees the building, ‘Like any one of us, looking for home.’ LeBlanc gives us permission to go into our memories, to relive and even reimagine the past, present, and future. ‘And if I am imagining it, sings old Bibeau, so what? Isn’t imagining seeing too?’ Or feeling. Or dreaming. The past LeBlanc gives us through the characters and stories in this collection is neither sunny nor dark, it is the sepia-toned dusk we glimpse just over our shoulder as we step inside and prepare for bed, where the line between memory, imagination, and dream is blurred just enough for us to travel with her, safely, allowed to ‘receive what’s left behind, and call it new.’” |
|
|
