A Pound of Dirt by Scarlet Colsen

Scarlet Colsen’s poems in A Pound of Dirt are not for the faint of heart. They reveal the roots of a woman’s pain—a forensic exploration of the burdens inadvertently passed from mother to daughter, generation upon generation. She examines the histories we write for ourselves, shifting fictions that may help us survive but come with a price: unfinished relationships and unfinished work, often covered by dust from years of paralysis.

With the urgency of the ordinary moment, A Pound of Dirt pushes through the pain. And while there is no forgetting the past, Colsen shows us a way forward, warm and light, always “reminding you/to remember that.”

Read A Pound of Dirt in the order in which they are offered, for each poem is a paving stone that will direct you through a dark, personal forest and out the other side. Once you are finished, return again to the first poem, you will invariably see the butterfly flapping its wings.

–Jean Synodinos, songwriter and painter

There is no tidying up of memories here. Scarlet Colsen creates a distillation of her battle with depression and pain which is so raw, brutal and daring, that we may be inspired to follow her bravery into our own depths of light and shadow. “Are you afraid that when your bud becomes a full-blown flower you too will start to die again?” Through bones of honesty and spaces filled with spirit, Scarlet Colsen’s poems embody early abuse, inherited grief, and the determination to find independence and meaning within her story. This is what it means to be a wise-woman, an Elder: to be willing to share with crystalline honesty, while ever open to pathways of truth and healing.

–Erin Schantz-Hilton, author of Midwife