Postcards from the Lilac City by Mary Ellen Talley

(1 customer review)

$14.99

 

Postcards from the Lilac City knows more than a thing or ten about hometowns and the tithing memory exacts. Mary Ellen Talley, its scribe, knows how memory takes form—repetitively, insistently, in uncontestable numbers, unshakable voices and resonant sensations—and she knows how to give dim shades indelible shape and also when to bide her time, letting the ghosts of the past do their work. She knows the iceberg theory of place, how much of lives spent in quiet places is underground, whispered, half-heard, half-hidden. But, when life does erupt in the Lilac City, it’s anything but sedate. It’s a spiffed- up antique carousel connecting the living and the dead: “The cemeteries are full / of riders.”; it’s a lust-ridden stone man sharing a lilac float with the annual crop of Lilac Queen contenders; it’s the sputtering butterfly wheel of the narrator’s first car; it’s a plucky traveler who measures the exotic against home in a series of wry postcards: “This place is 400 years old. I was given a white silk scarf / of respect and I even tried yak butter. I am still so Spokane.” This is a fine debut, and the Lilac City couldn’t ask for a better bard.

–Deborah Woodard, author of Borrowed Tales

 

 

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Postcards from the Lilac City

by Mary Ellen Talley

$14.99, paper

978-1-64662-317-4

2020

Mary Ellen Talley was born and raised in Spokane, Washington, the Lilac City, and then migrated to Seattle where she and her husband raised their two children. She earned degrees at the University of Washington and worked for many years as a speech-language pathologist (SLP) in Seattle area public schools.

Her poems have been published in numerous journals including Raven Chronicles, Banshee, What Rough Beast, Flatbush Review and Ekphrastic Review, as well as in six anthologies, among which are All We Can Hold and Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workplace. Her poetry has received two Pushcart Nominations. She reviews for several journals including Compulsive Reader and Asheville Poetry Review.

1 review for Postcards from the Lilac City by Mary Ellen Talley

  1. Esther Helfgott (verified owner)

    Postcards made me laugh and cry. You will strike gold if you open it. In Lilac City, the poet teaches and sings. Her story resonates
    with anyone who drove her teacher-mom to work in a car with the butterfly out of place, and with those of us who didn’t. This book of twenty-six poems is a love story to the author’s family and to the city she grew up in, Spokane, Washington.

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