Description
Night Halves is a winner of the Dryden-Vreeland Book Prize which honors poets who work (or have worked) in K-12 education.
“Joy is seldom pure” we’re told in Night Halves’ very first poem, but reading this book is pure joy, even though it puts us face-to- face with the kinds of difficulties that can make a person describe herself as “a glass box/slipping from the shelf.” There is childbirth (“Blind. Headlong”), the brain fog of brand-new motherhood (“There, there now. / Not a cloud in sight— / or is it all-cloud? / Never mind.”), watching an aging parent disintegrate (“His teeth have turned so brittle, now / that night’s unrolled its black tongue/in his mouth”), and the speaker’s own precarious health (“Pretend I can / know whether I’m treading the past/or holding the future’s hand”). These poems, born of acute honesty and deep observation, abound in exquisite descriptions and understated profundities, always keeping us aware that “The world is an equation, /the sky too slim to hold us all.”—Jacqueline Osherow,
Author of My Lookalike at the Krishna Temple: Poems
Rendered with an artist’s eye, creating a powerful collection of lyrical meditations testing out what pain and grief will hold, the poet always on the edge of a “sense of meaning / just beyond the field where I stand / with my boy.” Lovely.
—Glenn Freeman,
Author of Drinking with O’Hara
Christine Marshall is a poet and essayist. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Utah before moving to the South to teach. Author of Match (Unicorn Press, 2018), her poems and essays have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, the Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, The Sun and elsewhere. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.
