Four Way Books, 2019 Paper: 978-1-945588-36-5 Library of Congress Classification PS3551.L34779A6 2019 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.54
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Day of Our Lives is equal parts social history and memoir documenting the unraveling of a marriage against the backdrop of the shifting social mores of 1960s and ’70s America. Joan Aleshire’s speaker, a young wife, enters marriage gratefully, even eagerly, believing it to be “a long table / with friends crowding in, red wine / in tumblers.” Motherhood follows, but so do infidelities and reconciliation and ultimately divorce. With each hard knock, the speaker sheds a little more of her innocence as she gains awareness of her power as both a woman and a writer: “Coming home / late from a festival for women / where I’d said all the things / the audience liked, I slipped / into bed so flush with triumph / my husband recoiled from the heat.”
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Joan Aleshire was a member of the Warren Wilson MFA poetry faculty from 1983 through 2013. Days of Our Lives is her sixth book of poetry; she has also published essays and translations. She lives in Vermont, where she is a library trustee and the founder of SAGE, an organization that supports sustainable agricultural education and the arts. She is at work on a novel.
REVIEWS
"I couldn’t stop reading it, with the suspense of a novel, page after page; the stories build, a brilliant chronology — every day is a diary of detail in a marriage that starts at the very first touch between two people on a rooftop and moves to its dreadful conclusion....Gluck comes to mind more than once here, with the control, the ability to temporize decline and keep it alive and make it last through the pages...."
— Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books
Day of Our Lives is equal parts social history and memoir documenting the unraveling of a marriage against the backdrop of the shifting social mores of 1960s and ’70s America. Joan Aleshire’s speaker, a young wife, enters marriage gratefully, even eagerly, believing it to be “a long table / with friends crowding in, red wine / in tumblers.” Motherhood follows, but so do infidelities and reconciliation and ultimately divorce. With each hard knock, the speaker sheds a little more of her innocence as she gains awareness of her power as both a woman and a writer: “Coming home / late from a festival for women / where I’d said all the things / the audience liked, I slipped / into bed so flush with triumph / my husband recoiled from the heat.”
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Joan Aleshire was a member of the Warren Wilson MFA poetry faculty from 1983 through 2013. Days of Our Lives is her sixth book of poetry; she has also published essays and translations. She lives in Vermont, where she is a library trustee and the founder of SAGE, an organization that supports sustainable agricultural education and the arts. She is at work on a novel.
REVIEWS
"I couldn’t stop reading it, with the suspense of a novel, page after page; the stories build, a brilliant chronology — every day is a diary of detail in a marriage that starts at the very first touch between two people on a rooftop and moves to its dreadful conclusion....Gluck comes to mind more than once here, with the control, the ability to temporize decline and keep it alive and make it last through the pages...."
— Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books