Outside Paradise

As the song titles-each containing the word home-that shape these acrostic poems suggest, Joanne Allred's Outside Paradise is at heart a meditation on home. Having lost her beloved canyon dwelling to a wildfire, the so-called Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise, California, the speaker in these poems finds herself exiled from the bucolic life she had been living. How one's sense of self is entwined with place, possessions, and known pathways, becomes a central inquiry. Is home finally a place or a state of being? As the title's allusion to the lost biblical Paradise implies, being thrust suddenly outside one's established life, dispossessed, unveils a difficult human truth: in our separateness from source "we all hunger for some gone primal home." And so we sift ashes of memory and myth-as the poems in this collection do-trying to recover a sense of continuity, belonging, and trust that a "path that madly ricochets over scorched ground" could lead to wholeness.

• | Author: Joanne Harris Allred
• | Publisher: Word Poetry
• | Publication Date: Jan 29, 2024
• | Number of Pages: NA pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1625494521
• | ISBN-13: 9781625494528