Reservoir

Reservoir is a collection of original poems organized into three interconnected sections. Section one focuses on a particular location, rural Northwest Georgia, as a fictionalized place for the speaker to study personal and collective memory, storytelling, and the tension between humans and their natural environment. Section two moves beyond this geographical location to incorporate travel, art, genre, and found poetry. The third section returns primarily to individual female experience as it relates to parenting, teaching, gardening, loss, change, and how factors of location influence each of these themes. Poetic influences include the compressed language of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Southern Gothic humor of Flannery O’Connor, the regionality of Robert Frost, William Wordsworth’s approaches to the restorative visions of nature, theories of the imagination from Wallace Stevens to Terrance Hayes, and the deep imagery of Natasha Trethewey, Claudia Emerson, and Ada Limón. Some of these poems are funny