POETRY
Eat Your Words:
A Kansas Poety Cookbook
The creation of Kansas Poet Laureate Traci Brimhall, this cookbook features recipes from all four corners of Kansas. Twenty chefs offer up delicious recipes, each paired with a poem that it inspired.
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Aunt Jane’s Tomatoes
They’s nothing’ better than this,
she says, her big raw-boned hands
cupping the reddest tomato on the vine,
her other hand reaching for mine.
We press our backs into the good rich dirt,
tomato plants a colonnade above us,
a dappled arched ceiling like a cathedral,
the incense the pungent dust and spicy smell
of tomatoes in the garden.
Wandering Bone
My first collection of poetry, Wandering Bone, was published by Meadowlark Books in 2017, when I was in a hospital isolation ward fighting cancer. The poems in that book are about travel, both foreign and in my own back yard, as well as inner journeys.
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The Seventh Year
That’s how it started —
driving across Kansas on a wave of the blues,
poems working their way to the surface
bearing messages of stone and fern,
soul and bone and dirt.
The seventh year is the one when
everything changes — you’ve seen it coming
like a tornado on the horizon.
The sky turns black and yellow and green,
you run for the storm cellar
and play gin rummy on a rickety card table
next to the canned goods,
then sleep piled on the floor like puppies.
When birds carol the new day,
the sky like a basket of clean cotton towels,
nothing has changed but
everything is new.
©Olive L. Sullivan, 2017 – Wandering Bone
What readers say about Wandering Bone :
“With wildly original images, sparkling wit, and a voice all her own, Olive writes poetry of expansive courage and vision, tipping over the edge of dreams we can remember without understanding, and celebrating the impermanence of life’s nuances. In the end, she illuminates the vital colors, textures, shapes of pure desire, deep quandaries, and the kind of exploration that brings us to the essence of home—all on the way to ‘welcome the spirits in.’ As she writes in her poem, ‘Praise Song for the River,’ ‘We come to god each in our own way/but we find ourselves on the banks of the same river,/our hot feet dangling in the same cool green water.’ This collection of poetry shines with originality, wisdom, and power as it continually tilts the reader toward new ways to perceive their own journeys.”
—Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate and author of Everyday Magic: Field Notes on the Mundane and the Miraculous
Skiving Down the Bones
This is my pandemic book: my personal isolation and losses, as well as the world’s, and hope for the future. It delves deeper into those interior landscapes touched upon in Wandering Bone. I also wrote and produced a play, The Pocket Guide to Desert Survival, based on these poems.
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Moon Watcher
Moon watcher, mother, meticulous balancer,
her shining light has always
lit my path from behind,
even when clouds occluded it,
my way lost like an asteroid
adrift in a galaxy of fixed globes,
pinballing wildly.
Tonight, the moon is dark,
the sky an endless soft expanse
of black, only a couple of faint stars--
the winter constellations making way for summer'.
We're walking the dogs--
there have always been dogs, too.
She carries the flashlight,
I hold the leashes.
We count each star;
the dogs count every bush and shrub.
We cast our circle
over the sleeping neighborhood,
lock the gates,
put out the lights.
©Olive L. Sullivan
What readers say about Skiving Down the Bones :
“Coping with a Job-worthy siege of affliction and loss, Olive L. Sullivan leans deep upon poetry’s age-old capacities to invoke, petition, mourn, chant, console, purge, heal, and celebrate. In this skillfully and subtly woven collection, she moves through life’s challenging transformations—paying close attention to the visitations and portents of dreams as well as the signs and wonders of the natural world—to arrive at a place where there’s ‘only truth remaining.’ And who does not need that?”
—Jeanne Marie Beaumont, Letters from Limbo
“What we surrender, what we crave, what we pray is more than a mirage, what we fear is only a chimera—these are Olive Sullivan’s obsessions. In Skiving Down the Bones, Sullivan anatomizes loss in a marvelous range of voices. Her speakers are the priestess, the widow, the cancer patient, the uncaged soul reaching for Dickinson’s white heat. Like ‘notes falling into a minor chord,’ Sullivan’s lines dive and tremble. Sister to St. Ursula, Sullivan ‘knows/what we already know,/it’s just that she is willing/to say it out loud/and be pierced for it.’”
—Joshua Davis, Reversal Spells in Blue and Black
“Long before the Pandemic locked us all into our homes, my personal period of isolation began with my 2017 diagnosis of Acute Myleoid Leukemia, a particularly deadly and fast acting cancer,” writes Sullivan in the book’s opening pages.
The resulting collection of poetry paints a picture of loss, but also of survival in the face of loss. Skiving “through layers of / loss and sorrow, honing in on what matters,” this book shows us how one woman faces her own impending death, the loss of her husband and her father, and comes out on the other side, very much alive, “only truth remaining.”
—Meadowlark Press