I grew up with this confusing twisting in my stomach. If I were to choose one poem from this book that is a good example of its scope, I would choose this one from page 27: LOVE Farmer has had, there will always be something to turn into verse, some twist to offer the world. When I finished reading, I had the sense that this collection is only the beginning. There are always explosions, some small, some enormous, change the only constant. The poems are intense, each sonnet/story its own little narrative bomb. ![]() I intended to do just that on my first read-through, but stopped halfway to absorb what I’d just read. It felt like the kid in the sonnets was in freefall a lot, hoping for something or someone to catch her.įor me, this was not a book to gulp down in one sitting. The story then moves from that early trauma, surgery, and healing to the freewheeling existence that would define Ms. ![]() The story begins with a child born with a damaged heart. Farmer was a child of the 60s and 70s whose parents modeled a life of leaping into the moment: free love, drug use, back-to-the-land experiments, going wherever it felt right. Honest Sonnets shows us a girl who lived through tumultuous family dynamics that paralleled a tumultuous time in history. It made sense when I thought about the overall narrative: a childhood that lacked a solid structure to call home found its retelling in a poetic structure that offered all the boundaries a child who needed them could want. Something clicked, and for three months the sonnets flowed out of me…” The sonnet form allowed these poems to come together in just the right way, with the structure of each scene, each memory given its own little drawer. Farmer wrote, “I found the restrictions of having to tell a story in fourteen lines, in the structure of a sonnet both comforting and challenging. ![]() I’m not usually a fan of poetry books that stick to one form, preferring the surprise of poems that meander through whatever form seems to suit them. I dove right in to her newest, Honest Sonnets, a memoir composed in sonnets. When I received not one, but two books from poet Nicole Farmer this summer, I was delighted to see that this was another woman poet over 50 hitting her stride. Honest Sonnets: Memories from an Unorthodox Childhood in Verse by Nicole Farmer.
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