78 pages, $15, ISBN 978-0-9794582-1-7
Nancy K. Pearson, originally from Chattanooga, Tennessee, received
her MFA from George Mason University. Recently, she completed
two seven-month poetry fellowships at The Fine Arts Work Center in
Provincetown. An avid runner and cyclist, she now lives on Cape Cod
with her partner.
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“Nancy Pearson's poems are rife with the urgencies of constructing a self. It is a harrowing, hard-fought project. As one poem asks, ‘ By what small margins do we survive? ’ This is a book fiercely in love with the world, a book that unflinchingly examines what can keep someone from inhabiting that world, whole. Two Minutes of Light is a startling, luminous, and moving first collection.” —Kim Addonizio
“These poems remind me of collecting stones while walking, each one leading the way to a house in the forest. I want to say they spell redemption, but the forest has its own kind of talking and what’s extraordinary about this extraordinary book is how that world — tree, insect, rain, fish, flower, bird — has its saying and song too. I’ve never seen the world of human trauma and recovery set in what we call ‘the natural world,’ mediated by the human gaze, yes, and so blessedly indifferent to us. I read this book over and over again.” — Marie Howe
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To The High School Prom Queen
There’s just one highway. The wind rears up like a circus beetle.
The setting sun hangs purple tags on the mountains
as if night were for sale too. Las Vegas tilt o’ wheels
its neon legs toward the desert —
humming seamstress of broke down and ritz
tacking embroidery floss and velvet swag on everything.
You are there, in the Women's Correctional Institute,
sleeping on a cot in a former storage closet.
Miles away, snow wriggles through dune and pine.
Pork chops thaw in my sink; potatoes boil on the stove.
You behind a bar-pull of stars, sky-wandering
and homeless without the concrete hooks of a city.
You on the streets, cash-wadded and meth-loaded.
You, knocking out someone's teeth.
Dear friend, I have finally stopped trying to kill myself.
Sometimes the light comes in tiny points,
shark-toothed and smaller than stars;
sometimes, it sprays over everything.
Every day my scars shrivel up — lids of rain
in a garbage can. Once I wanted to travel.
Now I’m in love with the way whole Saturdays
weigh on my back with laminate flooring and wood piling.
My girlfriend and I throw chops on the grill,
fat floats above the trees. Shaken,
sometimes the stars, the pine needles spiral gracefully.
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