first poems after the stroke by Shanan Ballam

“Then it was over: that which you fear, being/ a soul and unable/ to speak;” these lines by Louise Glück might serve to suggest the power of Shanan Ballam’s luminous first poems after the stroke—language as the soul’s release, healing energy driving these poems of damage and recovery. Her observant gaze turns always outward to nature: its unfolding, its flowering, the way things turn toward light––nature’s transformations assuring her own: “I am a monarch/butterfly who will emerge/ with wet wings jeweled/with dew…”

–Eleanor Wilner author of Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems 1975-2017. 

Among the last things one might expect from a person who has suffered a massive stroke, even from a gifted young poet like Shanan Ballam, would be a distinguished chapbook of poems. first poems after the stroke doesn’t ask for our sympathy: it spurs a sympathetic vibration that kindles intense empathy. Ballam creates strands of richly evocative imagery from the natural world around her, beautiful in themselves but also handholds on her fierce climb out of paralysis, pain, and the “cobwebs of aphasia.” This chapbook is a work of heroism as well as breathtaking poetry.

–William Trowbridge, author of Call Me Fool

These poems spiral, following the ancient seats of knowledge from the belly to the brain and to the heart. They are beautiful poems of pain, courage and healing that are witness to the human capacity at its best to rise above suffering and explode into hope and joy. I loved reading these poems, and on reflection realize I haven’t used that verb regarding a new book of poetry in quite a long while…I will stand on that as my final reaction.

–David Lee, First Poet Laureate of Utah and author of Mine Tailings and Rusty Barbed Wire: Selected Poems.