Comets: Relationships That Wander by Annie Klier Newcomer

Annie Klier Newcomer‘s debut collection of poetry speaks to the world’s propensity to awe us in concert with all we love and lose. In writing about family, whether close at hand or long-gone, she explores the ties that bind, the grief that travels with us, and the love that remains. She also looks to the larger human family, writing in a poem about integration, “Some stories never end,” and to the cosmos, considering the cycles of comets. This lyrical collection invites us to consider the paths we live, like comets arching across time.

–Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Kansas Poet Laureate Emerita. (Author of How Time Moves: New and Selected Poems.)

Annie Newcomer’s first poetry collection brims with insight and attention to the rich, often fraught details of childhood and the struggles of adult life. Refusing to shirk the tough realities of illness, upheaval and loss, these intelligent and philosophical lyrics, “like masseuses cupping the sore/parts of our backs”, illuminate and decipher relevant parts of our common experience, and help usher in the process.

Nuanced, compassionate and alert, Newcomer’s poems shine a loving light on an American family’s history while casting their nets much wider than the few individuals they are ostensibly about. Whether recalling a disabled sister’s short life, musing over crazily hoarding neighbors, or discovering a husband’s secret love of poetry, Newcomer’s gentle wisdom permeates what it means to be alive in uncertain and often dark times and in a world that seems to “ treat (us) as though/ (we had) already left.”

–Laura Chalar, Uruguayan poet, author, translator ( Author of The Guardian Angel of Lawyers and Unlearning)

Newcomer’s first collection is a tribute to those people and moments that come into our lives, get our attention, make us dream, move us, possibly change us, and then move on. Memories of a father, unbreakable pottery that breaks, the feeling of running through a hose on a hot summer day, a sister’s too short life, buying a motorcycle, discovering New Zealand Sonnets, all gather here in honor of comets, those “maverick objects wandering/through the universe” becoming the events and people who cross our paths and are reminders for us to pause and “consider which wander away and might come back” to bless us a second time before moving on.

–Jamie Lynn Heller (Author of “Buried in the Suburbs” 2019 Kansas Notable Book of the Year and “Domesticated: Poetry from Around the House”)

Annie Newcomer writes with keen awareness of family bonds. In so doing she uncovers a web of potent memories wrapped up inside them. Not satisfied to stop at personal reflection, however, her poetic intention seeks to remind the reader that there are wrongs in this world and we each have social and political responsibilities to consider when weighing fairness and justice. This is the season for Annie’s voice to be heard among poets.

–Bruce McClain — Poet, Writer, Illustrator ~ forthcoming book, Aging Gathers No Dust