A Pretty Place To Mourn by Jan LaPerle

“In Jan LaPerle’s heartbreaking new collection, the poems break apart within themselves, full of fear, need, and mercurial beauty. They shine like wounds you don’t want to touch, but do – a close-up examination of what comes from within us. But there’s mystery here too. And play. And wonder. A narrative about the women inside of us who we both love and are terrified to be.”

—Erin Elizabeth Smith, author of The Naming of Strays

Jan LaPerle’s A Pretty Place to Mourn is “filled with knowing”—a dark, fearful, loving, motherly knowing about the unsafe worlds we all inhabit. So much falls, disappears, washes ashore; so much is “eaten from the inside out” or swallowed up in the earth. Her poems seek a safe ground that holds us all up, binding us to one another, even as we “stand in the middle of this loss.” Will our circle be unbroken? For the time being, let’s comfort ourselves with listening to LaPerle’s “generous love for others” singing on our behalf.

—Jeff Hardin, author of Fall Sanctuary and Notes for a Praise Book

Jan LaPerle lives in east Tennessee with her husband, Clay Matthews, and her daughter, Winnie. She teaches at Tennessee’s oldest college, Tusculum College. She has published a book of poetry, It Would Be Quiet (Prime Mincer Press, 2013), and an e-chap of flash fiction, Hush (Sundress Publications 2012), and several other stories and poems. She recently won an individual artist grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 68 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-185-6

$16

A Pretty Place to Mourn by … by Geoffrey Gatza