Seminomad Prayer Termite by M. Jeanne Skvarla

M. Jeanne Skvarla‘s ordinary world is alive with clocks that chime “eight times at noon.”  We meet a “Swedish acupuncturist” who watches the spinning moon with a “small Texan tourist.”  These poems are generous and inventive, gorgeously zany but heartbreakingly familiar as well.  More logical than dreams, but more dreamy than most lyrical poetry, Seminomad Prayer Termite is as lovely as “two deaf boys…whose hands and fingers flutter/  like pale birds talking/  about ordinary things/ no one else can understand.”

–Rick Alley, author of The Talking Book of July (EWU Press), and August Machine (Finishing Line Press)

The wonderfully grounded, surreal poems in M. Jeanne Skvarla’s Seminomad Prayer Termite speak to the beauty and horror of the everyday.  In “Because it’s supposed to be spring,” “treeroots brush the hair/from the foreheads/of the thawing dead . . . You think so what?” and eventually take the T “back to your two-eyed mother, the one who really loves you.” This first poem sets the tone for the rest of the work, a work that will have you accepting absurdities as easily as the commonplace.  Together they create a world—in the words of “Self-Portrait Part I”—that is “beautiful, patient, merciful and badass.”

–Lesley Dauer, author of Carnival Life (Mercer University press) and The Fragile City (Blue Stem Press)