Judy Wells' Dear Phebe: The Dickinson Sisters Go West

Dear Phebe by Judy Wells
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Judy Wells’ Dear Phebe: The Dickinson Sisters Go West, resurrects her ancestors in a poetry and prose reimagining of her great-grandmother and great aunts and uncles’ lives, culled from a trove of letters found in the 21st Century which were sent to Phebe before and after she came West from Massachusetts. Wells’ work is an exposition of the pioneer wife’s existence after she moved to Walnut Creek in 1865 as described in family letters, but poignantly reconstructed by Wells from the 21st Century. It’s a beautiful book from Crockett, California’s Sugartown Publishing, not light, but profoundly moving in a “real-life” way. “Delia,” she has one character say, “your pride in teaching/ gives you money and power/ to change your life.” True then as now!
Not exactly “mail-order brides,” the three sisters were highly sought after helpmeets, courted by dozens of suitors. The dangers, joys and losses of their young wife-and-motherhood and maturation and in her great-uncle’s grim Civil War history appear materially in Wells’ own life as she holds her grand-nephews, Nathaniel and Damon; and then as she recites “the names of my dead in the last year.” It is all fabric of the same cloth as she bluntly observes:
“I want to accept death
though I do not accept death.
I want to be courageous
though I am often fearful.”
It makes me want to read some of her eleven other poetry books and prose, including I Have Berkeley and The Berkeley Literary Women’s Revolution: Essays from Marsha’s Salon, co-edited with Marsha Hudson, Bridget Connelly, Doris Earnshaw and Olivia Eielson.

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Julia Vinograd!

Between the Cracks by Julia Vinograd
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Julia Vinograd’s Look Out, Between the Cracks and Detours: published by Zeitgeist Press in Berkeley, teach me why she was SO MUCH MORE than “the Bubble Lady” of Telegraph Avenue. She changed things outside herself by changing herself and by seeing and feeling things differently because of what and who she had seen and felt. The real power and simple, original imagery of her poetry cut a sharp line directly between the intellectual voice of reportage and observation of Phebe and the overwhelmed verbal heart-lava of Disorder.
She reminds us that “I was young” in “ANNIVERSARY OF PEOPLE’S PARK,” but “I remember when heroism grew wild/ as dandelions/ and people talked about how to get rid of it.” Her balance of leaden truth distilled with our greatest human desires, dreams and hopes is ferocious and visceral while seamlessly blending her focus on immediate experience with the much-needed long view.
In MY COUNTRY, she says, “I rode a bright red royal tricycle/ through my endless country/ and never believed anything could change.”
And then the clarity of her persona and voice in TRUCK:

I drove a truck down a highway at night
following the white line to the middle of the road.
The truck was packed with poems
wrapped in brown cardboard boxes
and bumping against each other when I drove over
fallen branches from the storm. Beetles and dragonflies
crashed against the windshield
until I sprayed them loose.
There were no other cars. Hunting owls. Wet mice.
A rest stop coming,
coffee, burger, pie, bathroom, jukebox.
The poems dragging me back,
my feet on the gas pedal.
The white line opening me up again,
forever.

Now THAT is our poetry. That is our voice.

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