I Wanted To Dance With My Father by Jan Ball

In her latest collection, Jan Ball captures with riveting intensity the bittersweet core of familial relationships. As this autobiographical collection unfolds, a portrait of a family through the eyes of a child, and later through adulthood, is both particular and universal. The incisive details of dinner table conversations, flowers, food, the ethnic accents of neighborhoods, the music and television of other eras, the childhood games, the wheelchairs and the funerals, a Catholic girlhood and convent life, eventual marriage, travel, and children, create an unforgettable collage of domestic tensions and hidden joys,  with Ball’s characteristic quirky humor and clear-sighted veracity never far from view.

–Donna Pucciani, author of Chasing the Saints, To Sip Darjeeling at Dawn, Hanging Like Hope on the Equinox, A Light Dusting of Breath, and Edges.

The blisteringly honest poems in I Wanted to Dance with My Father unfold in chronological order, reading like pages from a verse autobiography or memory book, spilling family secrets and life experiences in prismatic detail. I don’t know if all of Jan Ball‘s life is in these poems but life surely is. Grab this one.

–Bill Yarrow, author of The Vig of Love