Two Dreams of the Afterlife by Kelly Bancroft

The poems in Kelly Bancroft’s Two Dreams of the Afterlife are wild and beautiful as they create worlds from the ordinary made strange, and from the strange made predictable. The materials are everyday objects and events, especially our unavoidable deep connection to figures of popular culture (the Six Million Dollar Man, Wonder Woman, Hal the computer, and John Boy Walton). Through the rich mysteries of fairy tales and family lore, Bancroft can also break your heart. “I am so bi-polar/ I’ve met myself / at the equator,” she writes, and I am beguiled by this quirky unforgettable voice.

—Maggie Anderson, author of Dear All (Four Way Books, 2017).

The lines and sentences of Kelly Bancroft’s Two Dreams of the Afterlife are richly scored with the detritus of this life—dross we strain to grasp and escape. These are poems of startling attentiveness to the ghastly portents that mark the quotidian: the “ghost of the spittoon gulping your last wish,” or the “last words in lipstick on the mirror.” Bancroft reminds us that living requires practical art—a “stitched and restitched heart.” She draws our eye to the spectral threads entwining pulse and sleeve—in the “brushstrokes in a garden” or the spangled prosthetics of the Six Million Dollar Man and Wonder Woman, or a doll’s “pee hole” and “Glycerin tears,” or chillingly, the worker decapitated in an industrial accident who can’t be reassembled. James Wright once said he wanted to write the poetry of a grown man. Two Dreams of the Afterlife is the poetry of a grown woman still singing to her dream child, and to the Afterlife Dreamer in all of us.

—Philip Brady, author of The Elsewhere: New & Selected Poems (Broadstone, 2020)

Kelly Bancroft, also a playwright and essayist, has been published and produced widely. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation and the Ohio Arts Council and won the prestigious Betty Gabehart Prize in Nonfiction. A graduate of the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts program, she lives in Youngstown, Ohio, where she teaches at the Martin P. Joyce Juvenile Justice Center and at Hiram College. This is her first book.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-364-5

$16

Two Dreams of the Afterlife… by BlazeVOX [books]