Description:
Drexler weaves a tapestry of love, loss, grief, and acceptance-an elaborate kaddish in which she celebrates and sanctifies the names of the things, events, and persons she remembers.
Brief description: Wendy Drexler is recipient of a 2022 artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is the author of two earlier collections, most recently, Before There Was Before (Iris Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, The Threepenny Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review, among others. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily and WBUR, and in numerous anthologies. She's been the Poet-in-Residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, since 2018, and is programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club. She lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.
Review Quotes:
In Wendy Drexler's new book, the vividly remembered past and the carefully observed present are on intimate terms, constantly informing each other. So too the poet and the natural world, especially its animals, recalled and encountered with precision and empathy. Remembered parents provide an emotional undercurrent-especially the mother, addressed in a crown of sonnets that offers formal pleasure amidst the abundant visual surprises of these fine poems.
-Martha Collins, Casualty Reports
Wendy Drexler's Notes from the Column of Memory is a master class in perception. We are moved between ekphrastic poems and climate change, family and loneliness, guided by a woman grateful to a body changing and changed. Drexler's deft images, taut language, and well-wrought lines break "open a lifetime of devotions," the speaker and her memories "reclaimed, called back" to both history and home.
-Donika Kelly