The Length of a Clenched Fist by L A Felleman

At monthly open mic readings over the past few years, I’ve come to appreciate and look forward to LA Felleman’s poems, their conversational whimsy, their confident understatedness. Now you too can encounter these poems that fade “to a fragile pale glint.” In writing that spans the first eight months of the pandemic and quarantine, Felleman shares a generous range of interests, concerns, and sympathies – from Amazonian vampire bats to white privilege, from her landlord to Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, from the derecho to sandhill cranes. You’ll discover poems that have the crisp, chiseled feel of prayers addressing our faith, doubt, grace, and grief, that ponder how the world might be “if only I had more.”

–David Duer,  recently retired from teaching English language arts at Cedar Rapids Washington High School. He served for many years as the Washington Literary Press faculty advisor. In the late seventies he was the editor of the literary magazine Luna Tack, and in the early eighties performed his poetry with local new wave bands The Monos’lab Orchestra and Pink Gravy. Duer worked as an editorial associate and assistant printer at The Toothpaste Press and Coffee House Press until its move from West Branch, Iowa, to Minneapolis. His work has appeared in Ascent, Exquisite Corpse, English Journal, Little Village, North American Review, and Poetry, among others. A chapbook of his poetry, To Bread (o.p.), has been published by Coffee House Press.

LA Felleman’s The Length of a Clenched Fist lives in the only habitable places of the early pandemic: crowded grocery stores, bird cam livestreams, wetland trails, borrowed homes, and memories of the Before Times. Instead of trying to keep pace with a year of global health crises, social uprisings, and natural disasters, these poems fall into step with rhythms of the domestic and natural worlds, the grounding repetitive acts of sweeping floorboards and listening to the calls of sandhill cranes. Under Felleman’s meditative gaze, poetry becomes a practice, too: she observes the seemingly circumscribed world so closely that it begins to shimmer and swell, spilling out over the edges of quarantined life.

–Becca Klaver