Not My First Walk on the Moon by Linda Hillman Chayes

Watch the word “here” as it carries these poems across thresholds and verges—seashore, barrier island, cityscape, season, calendar year. In these deftly observant lyrics, we find ourselves “Here, but going somewhere else,” or “sun-dazed, shoeless, / suspended / between here and / somewhere else.” These wise and meticulous poems move from here to here on the way to an unknown elsewhere—moving through the liminal space between remembrance and the particular slants of light of the present. Painterly, precisely rendered in a muted palette of sepia and twilight, these poems span the duration of a pandemic and reach back into a haunted familial past, an expanse of time that is, like the sky, “open / to interpretation or storm.”

–B. K. Fischer, author of Ceive

“The Facts // are never the story,” Linda Hillman Chayes writes in her sophomore chapbook, Not My First Walk on the Moon. And in richly detailed, nuanced lyrics, Chayes tells the whole story, exploring parenthood, personal history, memory, that which is “here, but going somewhere else.” Formally dexterous and playful, these poems beautifully explore the nature of time itself–how it can bind or rupture, what it gives and what it can take away.

–Nathan McClain, author of Previously Owned

Open to “Turner’s Paintings of the Sea at Margate” and read a bittersweet tribute to the poet’s mother “lit from inside like regret.” Not My First Walk on the Moon offers wit, vivid phrases, and a deep grasp of relationships to bring a multi-generational family to life, its history “shaped like the sweater draped over” a grandmother’s shoulder. This second collection encompasses an ode to New York and an ode to eyeglasses. Through the metaphor of a crime scene, Linda Hillman Chayes persuades a reader “The facts/ are never the story.” Don’t doubt for a moment that she has walked on the moon.

–Marion Brown, author of The Morning After Summer