Christine Andersen's To Maggie Wherever You've Gone was the
winner of the Choeofpleirn Press chapbook contest.
Our judge made this comment:
To Maggie Wherever You’ve Gone is a chapbook-length elegy to a young woman who committed suicide by hanging herself. While these poems contain specific details, the poems often end with resonant images and metaphors, allowing the “words [to]…hit the floor screaming” before the poet, in visiting the hill where this woman's ashes were scattered, believes that "the earth / had swallowed my folly, / entombed my grief." These poems move from grief to bewilderment before repeating these steps. Ultimately, the poet reaches a kind of recognition in that the desire to kill ourselves may sometimes exist, and it takes “feel[ing] the noose / tied taut against the neck…to be absolutely sure that we / would never jump.”
This book is available at Amazon and through bookstores like
Barnes & Noble. Electronic copies are available as well.
