Making Home by Elise Toedt

“I admire and am taken in by the path this poet creates for her readers.   We are given such an essential, dark welcome—these family memories, these childhood nightmares, these visions of a child practicing being good, practicing being bad, learning the family’s and God’s lessons by watching and listening and imitating— I loved every move the poet made.  And the poems stay complicated, and human, and full of wisdom, and we see that some hard-earned grace and peace does arrive in the narrator’s life. A great pleasure reading this fine book by Elise Toedt.”

–Deborah Keenan, author of eleven collections of poetry and a book of writing ideas, from tiger to prayer. Her newest book is The Saint of Everything.  

“How shall we love the troubled world? By naming every blessed fragment, by inscribing every sharp memory, every loss that won’t stay gone. By reciting recipes of everyday life and watching with wonder the ways a child moves in the world. Such are the lessons of Elise Toedt’s fine debut collection, Making Home. These poems sing with wise simplicity.”

–Julia Spicher Kasdorf, author of As Is, University of Pittsburgh Press

“Making Home is a complex and beautiful meditation on the many cycles of making and unmaking in life– the creative power of tending gardens, cooking, harvesting, caretaking, and writing poetry. The poems bear witness to cruelty in others and take stock of the cruelty we ourselves are all capable of while asserting the primacy of compassion, nourishment, and love. These poems are call and response testimonies and songs about the creative and destructive tendencies in human morality, relationships, spirituality, and desire, all illuminated with dazzling language and imagery. We lean in to listen, for these poems speak with authenticity, intimacy, and wisdom. Watching her son play in a puddle she writes, “It is so simple for him to love his life, I think / It could be so simple for me to love my life.” And we come away with a reminder of the deep sacredness of caring and tending for those we love, those we struggle to love, the natural world, and ourselves.”

–Heathen (Heather Derr-Smith), author of five collections of poetry, most recently Outskirts