You Are Not Lost

<p>You Are Not Lost peels the soft and hopeful places of young life while expertly making applesauce. Jeri Frederickson uses the familiar scaffolding of a sonnet crown and everyday objects as a channel to nurture love and access beauty while questioning the experiences that hold us together. After life's questions receive unfulfilling answers: press it down and Your future life / is free. No refunds the poems untangle first-loves family and climate change by looking inward turning the questions over and over as the speaker used to do apples: Tonight are you the crunching sound? / Are you my friend? I'm not ready to miss you. Jim Daniels author of Gun/Shy says of these poems surprise and sustain keeping us delightfully off-balance with their sharp wit and surprising vulnerability. Even as trauma stitches through experiences the collection refuses contemporary trauma labelling as adequate. I have set my childhood nightmares / a place to rest their leather heads. Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo author of Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge says the strength of her poetic voice is a reminder to all who read that within the roots of ancestral wounds there is space for growth. The speaker in the poems realizes she can't banish trauma or force a resilient narrative. Instead laughter and hope hold hands with trauma and walk together with the reader finding their way into the future not lost.</p><p><br></p><p><br></p>