Alison Hicks
Homing
by Alison Hicks
ISBN: 978-1-962405-11-97
$16.00 ($4.63 US Shipping)
EVENTS & PRESS:
Check out Alison’s reading and interview with Charles Carr for Philly Loves Poetry on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77eIfkeAyWY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alison Hicks was awarded the 2021 Birdy Prize from Meadowlark Press for Knowing Is a Branching Trail. Previous collections are You Who Took the Boat Out and Kiss, a chapbook Falling Dreams, and a novella Love: A Story of Images. Her work has appeared in Eclipse, Gargoyle, Permafrost, and Poet Lore. She was finalist for the 2021 Beullah Rose prize from Smartish Pace, an Editor’s Choice selection for the 2024 Philadelphia Stories National Poetry Prize, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Green Hills Literary Lantern, Quartet Journal, and Nude Bruce Review. She is founder of Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which offers community-based writing workshops.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Homing asks how we can make a home in a multifaceted world. The poems explore how we may take care of ourselves and the communities to which we belong, including non-human ones, when we and they are put under pressure. What is necessary for creativity, for joy? The book suggests that by attending to the visions offered by the sensual and natural worlds and the voices in which memories sing and sting, we might succeed in asking what we want. From there, arrive at a garden that despite knowing brutality, welcomes life in its varieties and offers up bounties for all, where as sunlight dims, worker bees keep themselves and the colony alive.
ADVANCE PRAISE
In her gorgeous new book Homing, Allison Hicks invites the reader to consider that home is this earthly journey and that all of us are potential mystics. In poem after stunning poem, the poet searches for home in its many guises: motherhood, parents, history, nature. Above all, Alison Hicks explores the home of making, whether through building a swing set for a child, hemming a skirt, writing a poem, playing a musical instrument, or carving a doll of mountain ash as she describes in one poem:
carved from a single block
of brown wood, two braids coiled at the base of her neck,
that came to me through my mother from the grandmother . . .
These poems, arising from the romantic tradition, explore the mystery of everyday existence, mysteries left unsolved, as in the poem “The Wanderers”: “The map does not show the way back.” Yet with all that remains unresolved, the poet runs errands, does the dishes, goes grocery shopping. Each adult chore offers the possibility of astonishment, even a return to the grocery store and the beauty of a pyramid of green apples after being lost five days in the wilderness.
In making music, poetry, art, marriage, and children, these poems not only deftly show the reader a way home; they offer wonder: “Each discovery reminded me that more discoveries were possible.”
––Katherine Smith, author of Woman Alone on a Mountain and Argument by Design
Homing, Alison Hicks’ new collection of poems, sits deeply in the heart and the world. In thoughtful awareness of the painful difficulties of life—personal violations, “haggling/over costs and benefits,” global warming, shootings—as well as its beauty (“Blossoms spill upending,/ascension without presumption.”), the collection urges us to “Open up, open up, open up!” These poems are wise and necessary.
––David Ebenbach, author of What’s Left to Us by Evening and Some Unimaginable Animal
In the title poem of Homing, a gently ruminative collection that probes the ungraspable passage of time, a baby’s shoe on the sidewalk sparks reflections on transience: “Like everyone, I am bewildered by time. / I do not seek to go back.” Yet the poet does go back, unearthing childhood memories of rotting rope swings and wooden dolls, taking the reader on a tour of a marriage, older motherhood, and caring for aging parents. Amidst the many mundane responsibilities of adulthood, the poet inhabits a different, perhaps parallel life: “an end to negotiation of duties / to client, parent, house, and child, / to body and poetry,” in which she can follow dogs running under stars on a frozen night or get lost on a hiking trail or at a meditation retreat. In sharing her journey with crisp detail and poignant reflection, Hicks invites the reader to contemplate their own journeys, to pause and appreciate what is here right now before it becomes a “threadbare, see-through scrap of memory.”
––Hila Ratzabi, author of There Are Still Woods, winner of a gold Nautilus Award in poetry
