Point of Attachment
Available from: www.finishinglinepress.com
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The revelations in Ann Bookman’s collection are frank and open, and her use of metaphor is imaginative. There is no slacking in these beautifully crafted poems that come fresh and original as you turn each page.
Freddy Frankel, author of Hotentot Venus, In a Stone’s Hollow and Wrestling Angels, is the winner of the Robert Penn Warren First Award in 2003.
The carefully crafted poems in Point of Attachment offer a luminous lesson in how we live between love and loss. Those points that attach to what nourishes us – the hands that hold us when we learn to float, the felled trees whose comforting shade we remember although the wood chips cannot be reassembled. Ann Bookman shows us how they hold us if we are, as she is, fortunate enough to have them and wise enough to recognize them.
Ellen Steinbaum is author of four collections, including Afterwords, Container Gardening, Brightness Falls and This Next Tenderness.
Why I Wrote Point of Attachment:
I am interested in how human attachments are formed – between parent and child, between lovers, between people and material objects.
The chapbook is also about the attachment between people and particular places—geographic locations—especially birthplaces. “Birthplace” is a very interesting word that extends beyond the place where your mother gave birth to you. For me, a “birthplace” is a space where a part of you that is essential to your being, your wellbeing, has emerged.
What makes some attachments strong, why some are fragile? What happens when attachments are broken – through distance, illness, death or other forms of physical and emotional separation? Can attachments be repaired? Can they be transformed, particularly when a person you are strongly attached to is no longer part of life as we know it?
While the book is about the lived experience of attachment, it is also – and especially – about memory. In this chapbook, I explore the place of memory in shaping and reshaping attachment, the way that memory reinvents attachments as we change and grow older. The book is in some sense a struggle to let go of old attachments – from multiple periods of my life – create new ones, accept new ones, celebrate new ones.
