Fruit Box Castles: Poems From a Peach Rancher’s Daughter by Jennifer O’Neill Pickering

Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet, he asks, if you had nothing, no sounds of the world coming to you, “would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories?”  Jennifer’s book stays true to Rilke’s “treasure-house” of childhood, exploring the richness of a youth growing up in California’s farmland… “an island of yard/surrounded by oceans of trees.” Jennifer Pickering’s poems bring us home.

–Robert Stanley, Poet Laureate Sacramento 2009-12

What a pleasure it was to read Jennifer’s work. Sometimes I simply sat back after reading a poem and said aloud, Wow! Her descriptions are shot through with originality and love. In one of her most powerful poems “The Alchemy of Grief,” she writes, “In theory we begin our journeys at birth. Travel backwards moving forward.” Take that journey with her in Fruit Box Castles.

–Wendy Patrice Williams, In Chaparral: Life on the Georgetown Divide, California (Cold River Press) Bayley House Bard and Some New Forgetting. Her prose is published across the U.S.

This collection illuminated with a sense of place: farms, orchards, family, “Mom midwifed rows of freestones…winter Mother sews hope into gingham curtains.” There is much to delight in the sensory: stubbled fields, perfume of pears. Hard labor is honored, planting, harvesting, “summer saved in jars.” And working in a cannery: “Hands that burn from sweet juice…where jobs were scarce as shade.” “Morning light poured across the wooden planks,” reminds one of Vermeer.
–Jeanine Stevens is the author of, Limberlos, a six-time Pushcart Nominee and the winner of the national poetry award from WOMR.