Selling the Family by Nancy Kay Peterson

Selling the Family is a series of muted elegies, informal in tone, devoted in respect, and suffused with melancholy longing. Nancy Kay Peterson here voices the deepest feelings in everyday speech, tinged with sorrow and longing. These pages recall to us all some of our most resonant experiences. We too shall not forget.

–Fred Chappell, poet, fiction writer, essayist, and former North Carolina poet laureate

The poems in Nancy Kay Peterson’s Selling My Family are Peterson’s burden and heritage, expressions of aloneness and loss, and works of magic. In holding, for example, a comforter and blanket she realizes she is “…the only soul left alive to know/ the meaning of their weight and warmth.” The barn built by her father, a “sommer hytte,” is the repository of metaphors, the family’s household remains, some of which are “saleable” and others “forever worthless … worth barely a glance.” But as Peterson works among them– “I will be clean;/I will be whole;/I will be empty”–objects call up remembrance. In sorting each one “… my family, gone now, loving them… “she inherits her lost family’s blessing.

–Sharon Chmielarz, author of The J Horoscope

Selling the Family is Nancy Kay Peterson at her deepest and sharpest. This is a moving elegy, a litany, an inventory of memories by a poet mourning that she is the sole surviving member of her family. A lesser poet might wax sentimental, but Nancy Peterson keeps it clear-eyed, direct, and lean. The formal sparseness of the poems reflects the culture of her Norwegian forebears–26 pages that could easily be a novel. The language is crystal-clear as is the imagery. There is a profound emotional honesty in this set of poems.

–Ken McCullough, author of Broken Gates and Dark Stars