Wendy McVicker
Alone in the Burning
by Wendy McVicker
ISBN: 9781962405072
$14.00 ($4.00 US Shipping)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wendy McVicker, 2020-2022 poet laureate of Athens, Ohio, is a longtime Ohio Arts Council teaching artist. Her previous books include the dancer’s notes (Finishing Line Press, 2015), the self-published collaboration with visual artist John McVicker Sliced Dark (2019), Zero, a Door (The Orchard Street Press, 2021), and Stronger When We Touch, a collaboration with poet Cathy Cultice Lentes (The Orchard Street Press, 2023). She loves collaborating with artists in many media and performs with instrumentalist Emily Prince under the name “another language altogether” whenever she gets the chance. Her children having grown and flown, she lives surrounded by the green hills of southeastern Ohio with her husband and a Hemingway cat named Dora.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Alone in the Burning reveals a watchful, sensitive child trying to find a way to thrive in a difficult environment. In spare, lyrical language, McVicker gives us a collection of imagistic poems that evoke the child’s claustrophobic world, blended with prose poems that create complication, momentum, and tension, drawing the reader into the search to connect to intuition, the need to find a way through the burning, to breathe. Language and the natural world provide her with clues, pointing to freedom and authentic self-hood. Reading Alone in the Burning is like listening to a piano fugue, notes dropping one by one into silence, each enlarging our awareness with subtle echoes that continue to resonate after we’ve turned the last page.
ADVANCE PRAISE
In Alone in the Burning, we enter the experience of a child disoriented by her domestic environment, a perilous landscape where time seems to be measured by emotional displacements and inversions of scale. Learning to read, she finds that books form “causeways / through the swamp / away / from the rising tide.” This is a vivid, poignant exploration of how we create and are created by stories as we hunger for the generational healing that sometimes seems almost within reach.
––Claire Bateman, author of Wonders of the Invisible World and The Pillow Museum
Wendy McVicker’s Alone in the Burning is powerful collection of poems offering us the inner life of a child in danger. “How to tell this story from the heart of the fire? / How far must we fly to escape the embers?” the speaker asks in the opening poem. Yet there is beauty and safety in the child’s experience of both the world outside this burning house and within the world of words where “one sentence / one tree was all // it took to fly.” And fly at last she does, as this “is a story about a girl who learned to live in books,” and ultimately to tell the tale through these spare, image-laden poems that “tell it slant” with heartbreaking precision.
––Pauletta Hansel, poet and 2022 Writer in Residence
for the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County
