Sugar Fix

The subjects of poetry are the same: love and loss sex and death and grief family in all its permutations and complications. The differences are in the telling and Kory Wells is a powerful teller. Her poems are as layered and dense as her grandmothers Red Velvet cake. What is it she asks that makes us want to swallow // a story whole? To think // only one version can be true?With a clear eye she confronts the paradoxes that gender race and heritage present. She writes from a rootedness in her homeland that reaches down generations. She writes as a citizen of this troubled world: Im unlearning the urge for a sugar fix like Im unlearning // my threshold for what is acceptable terrible commonplace. // Tell me I dont have to unlearn hope.She does what we ask of the poet. All that we ask. --Marie Harris former New Hampshire Poet Laureate