Learning to Sleep in the Middle of the Bed by Alexis Cameron Stark

I too am learning to sleep in the middle of the bed, but most nights my wife claims Right, as I am Left to my thoughts until my eyes are done fighting for light. Somewhere in the journey across these pages, I saw my grandfather’s sweater in the mirror of a 90s sweater as I meditated on grief. I was sent home with ‘A Church in the Wild’, that I know in my bones will become art on a wall even if just in my mind. Which is to say, this collection is home. Late night, wherever you rest your head. But maybe, rest it here for a while?

You won’t regret it.

–Marcel “Fable” Price, Grand Rapids Poet Laureate 2017-20, Executive Director of The Diatribe

Just as the title of this book suggests, it is learning how to be attentive to and make adjustments concerning the small things in our lives that teach us to come to know who we are and how to cope with the larger issues.  An umbrella, her mother’s sweater, a stoplight all serve as ordinary objects that unlock for the narrator a larger truth.  Opening with “Honesty Poem,” the poet prepares the reader for the fact that there will be some difficult stories, some admissions, some details we might rather not know.  Concluding with “Writer’s Cramp,” where the poet feels words are “trapped alone…nowhere to go,” we see that the poet has found a place for these words, despite the fact that the pen might one day  “turn on me and/gouge my eyes out.”

In these poems we encounter struggle, grief, self-examination, and recovery often tinged with humor, the unexpected, the insightful.  There is a little bit of Alexis Stark in all of us,  and we might do well to get reacquainted.

–Anita Skeen, Founding Director, RCAH Center for Poetry at MSU and Series Editor, Wheelbarrow Books.