Letters from Limbo

In Beaumont’s new book, Letters from Limbo, voices of the dead reach the living through various means, including the titular letters, revealing experiences harrowing and mysterious. Fluent in many modes, the poet commands varied poetic forms both illuminating and celebrating the haunting truth of our unpredictable earthly sojourn as we dwell in metaphorical limbo.

Jeanne Marie Beaumont grew up on a farm in Charlottesville, Virginia. She received her BA from Hamilton College and her MFA from Vermont College. Her poems and stories have a appeared in my literary journals and anthologies including Agni, Ploughshares, and Best American Poetry. The recipient of two Ohio Arts Council grants, she is the author of many books including Miss August (CavanKerry Press 2017), The Book of Orgasms, Southern Comfort (CavanKerry Press 2009), and Why God Is a Woman.

Adept at teasing out every implication of a word, through ekphrastics, epistolary poems, and lyric, she explores limbo both as a place of afterlife and a state of internal confinement and stasis, “borderlines within which change can occur.” In “Asylum Song,” the book’s middle section, Beaumont excavates as delicately and patiently as an archaeologist the hidden history of her immigrant grandmother who died after three weeks in a state asylum. Throughout, Beaumont’s poems glow with her metaphors’ intelligence, precision, and complexity.
— Carol Moldaw

These lucent poems refract our experience as they meditate on a created world, the speaking dead more vibrant, more eloquent for their liminal state. Beaumont has created a universe all her own whose speaking is a unique idiom—timeless and moving and unerringly memorable.
— Peter Cooley

October 2016
108 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
ISBN 978-1-933880-59-4