In Velvet: New and Selected Poems - Paperback

by Jeanne Bryner (Author)

Here is a full collection of Jeanne Bryners work as an American woman and nurse. Jeanne Bryner asks of us, "Where are the great studies on buried miners/burned women, displaced steel workers/the lost towns gutted like deer/people left to choose between the river and the sky?" In this new collection of poetry, Bryner celebrates and mourns those unstudied and unsung. With stunning specificity, she catalogs their courage: the nurse who, from a blue paper cup, baptizes a dying husband; the firefighter kneeling beside the gurney of a toddler; a schoolteacher carrying a disabled child "down/every/single/step/in those ivory pumps." Bryner's tender rendering of the unsung reminds us of our fleeting connection between the river and sky. - Geraldine Gorman, co-editor with Paula Sergi for A Call to Nursing,

Jeanne Bryner works language, opens it unexpectedly, pries meanings and memories, spins gold from mud, and always hears and speaks the sorrows and hopes of working people. This collection is restorative, an immense and moving achievement.

-Janet Zandy, author of Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work

Back Jacket

I love Jeanne Bryner's poetry for the way it pulls me our of being lost in relentless abstract thinking and returns me to the real world of nature and people who know how to live and work in it. Jeanne sees and feels the actual world and also meanings and metaphors, and then shares her vision and her feelings in language that for me brings the world "health" to mind and then becomes love, of the most generous kind. Love, strength and beauty radiate from Jeanne's poems as, indeed, they do from herself, personally. -Gurney Norman, author of Kinfolks, and former Poet Laureate of Kentucky