Same Old Story

Even as she reminds us that writing “doesn’t solve anything,” Potter is driven to chronicle “the years murmur[ing] their old tune” in this compilation of sonnets, extended narratives, and shifting invented forms. Her rushing lyric voice binds together the personal, cultural, and imaginative histories that create the inevitable complications of human character.

Dawn Potter is the author of eight books of prose and poetry, including How the Crimes Happened (2010), and Same Old Story (2014). New work appears in theBeloit Poetry Journal, the Split Rock Review, Vox Populi, and many other journals. She has received fellowships and awards from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Writers’ Center, and the Maine Arts Commission, and her memoir Tracing Paradise won the Maine Literary Award in Nonfiction. Dawn directs the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and leads the high school writing seminars at Monson Arts. She lives in Portland, Maine.

Variously delightful in their strategies and shapes, the poems of Same Old Story know that merely examining life cannot make it worthy… Dawn Potter evokes the fragile poise of our longings. Her deft formal skills, her self-questioning wit, and her brave infiltrations of ordinary experience with poetry’s cumulative resources illuminate every page of this memorable book.
— Robert Farnsworth

“Driving” is the presiding conceit that shapes Dawn Potter’s new collection, Same Old Story, and what an exhilarating ride this is! From the mythos of antiquity, to fairytales, to nineteenth-century novels, to relief when “the plow guy” shows up on Valentine’s Day, in a world where “newsmen / chant wind-chill rates and hockey stats,” Potter marries the quotidian and the sublime pretty much line by line. That pairing is dictional, syntactical, rhythmical, and often conceptional as well, but always, always, the scope is sweeping and the affect—in this reader’s experience—unparalleled. In her “Notes from a Traffic Jam,” the poet exclaims, “Oh, sometimes I fear I’ve lost the will to imagine / this comedy, this ugly beauty, this moving-picture world,” but Potter doesn’t have to imagine it. She sees it clearly, and how brilliantly she has shaped her craft to capture it and give it back to her readers illuminated and writ large. Potter’s sustained acts of synthesis and transformation are an astonishing achievement
— Gray Jacobik

March 2014
116 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
978-1-933880-40-2