Fence, Patio, Blessed Virgin by Kristin Brace

Kristin Brace’s Fence, Patio, Blessed Virgin takes us down a loving rabbit hole into the revelation that time and space are indeed a continuum, but not the one we have come to understand. We discover that there are many times and many spaces seamless and occurring at once. Hallucinatory in juxtaposition and structure, the narrator keeps us oriented as we enter this trans-personal history with “the old birds blurring into the new.”

–Jack Ridl, author of Practicing to Walk Like a Heron

Setting out in a Buick that sails over the prairie, poet Kristin Brace voyages through her grandmother’s “slow winding down of the physical self.” The poems in “Fence, Patio, Blessed Virgin” are heart-brave. They don’t flinch from the hard knock of truth, don’t dip into easy sentiment; rather each accomplished line honors that grandmother’s complex life journey through a keen eye, an ear tuned to the marvelous music of storytelling, and admirable, elegant poetic aptitude.

–Kathleen Driskell

Like her grandmother’s “bushes dense / with raspberries,” Kristin Brace’s twin-twining threads of alternating poems in Fence, Patio, Blessed Virgin proffer bitter-sweet detail after precise detail—bitter for the inevitable and sometimes heart-breaking changes to family they depict, so sweet for their tender and heartening ways of remembering. Brace is a personal narrator, but in her poet hands, these intimate and interlaced stories celebrate the everyday of us all.

–D. R. James, author of If god were gentle