Where the Dead Are

Praisner’s poems speak to anyone who has experienced love, loss, and survival. The poet moves through time and space to offer glimpses into her life and the lives of others—lives both extraordinary and ordinary. She shows the magic and dignity of everyday life—putting the domestic facts of life, like making egg salad or digging for cockles, into the poetry of mourning. She reveals a reality in which life and death coexist, shows how our lives are linked, once to the other, how the dead once relegated to the “dark corners” of childhood, are in fact still with us.

Wanda S. Praisner, a recipient of fellowships from the NJ State Council on the Arts, the Dodge Foundation, PFAWC, and VCCA, has work inAtlanta Review, Lullwater Review, and Prairie Schooner. Books include: A Fine and Bitter Snow (USCA, ’03), On the Bittersweet Avenues of Pomona (Spire P., ’05), Where the Dead Are (CKP, ’13), Sometimes When Something Is Singing (Antrim H., ’14), Natirar ( Kelsay B., ’17), and To Illuminate the Way (Aldrich P., ’18). A resident poet for the state, she’s received sixteen Pushcart Prize nominations, the Egan Award, Princemere Prize, Kudzu Award, First Prize in Poetry at the College of NJ Writer’s Conference, and the 2017 New Jersey Poets Prize.

These poems are beads gathered from around the world and threaded on the singular, haunting death of a college-aged son by drowning—so that, in them grief itself becomes a country that can have no boundaries at all. The poems embody both memory and absence, rendered emotionally raw and yet invariably, indelibly elegant. Praisner knows how to wield a resonant image without hysteria or hyperbole; through her restraint, her images seem an outgrowth of a natural decorum. Her narrator, in the lovely poem “Come Night,” “thought grief must be like the hot tea she held—a matter of letting it go cold in the cup, / a matter of waiting.” Here, in Where the Dead Are, Wanda Praisner has made it beautifully clear that the particular waiting she speaks of will never, ever end. Always the sound of the axe in the orchard,” she says. And her whole world’s an orchard.
— Renée Ashley

As the title suggest, death is everywhere in Wanda Praisner’s book, Where the Dead Are, a powerful retelling of her travels around the world and into memories of the past. With striking visual imagery, she makes us see and feel the vulture flying overhead, a mutilated girl found, the sudden death of a son drowned in a swimming pool. “Unbidden, the past arrives, sits so close I can feel its breath” and so does her reader. Her language, poetic and precise, makes us feel and share emotions described and events visited in these fine poems.
— Jean Hollander

March 2013
100 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
978-1-933880-35-8