How the Crimes Happened

Whether they’re graveside tourists in Rome or lovelorn girls on a bus, the characters in Dawn Potter’s ravishing second collection of poetry, “betray a fatal longing” for love’s complications. By turns comic and melancholy, hungry and euphoric, these poems surrender again and again to the passions and panics of experience.

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.

Don’t be afraid to

lug a fat kid into rain, laugh when his mouth
flaps opens like a chick’s, stumble south
through weary dumps and truck-torn
roads, past autumn gnats who mourn
at Greaney’s turkey farm, where redcoats
sling up roosters heel by heel, slit throats,

drain hearts, while maples twist an eye-
blue sky, a rush of wild geese swings by:
good enough day to kill or die,
perch shivering on a tailgate, fly.

This poet’s relationship to language is nearly physical in its intensity. Fearless and headlong, these poems sing in service to love, loss, pity, and hope. Whether a story of Keat’s last days in Rome or a B-team basketball game in a small New england town, or a poem that joins the Red Sox, Oedipus, and the sphinx and the Devil Rays and Grendel’s mom in the same breath, this poet’s ambition is large and her authority clear. In “Litany for J,” a poem in memory of a dead friend, the poet recounts the list of things they had planned to get done: “sing like angels on moonshine, like fire, like sin.” And she does.
— Ellen Dudley

John Keats might have been writing to Dawn Potter when he said, “There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music.” With a chant from the bad boys on the back of the bus and a honk of the gymnasium buzzer, these poems tackle the commotion of life: flip-flopping love (constant only in its thorny complications); glorious yet ignoble parenthood; and pitiless death, robbing us of our finest poets and closest friends. Here, “In our Troubled Sea, Mire and Mud heave up apace” and “America is stocked with Rattle Snakes,” yet the earth is so beautiful even the devil hesitates before unleashing his havoc. All that’s left to do is revel in the uproar–and read How the Crimes Happened.
— Meg Kearney

April 2010
78 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
978-1-933880-17-4