In my hands, another beautiful MoonPath Press book, its cover, House of Dreams by Michelle Bear for Priscilla Long’s Cartographies of Home.
At the head of the collection, one poem stands by itself before the other fifty-one, which Long groups into three sections, “Childhood’s Slow River,” “Old Maps,” and “Home Ground.” “What Was Given, What Was Found” (p. 3), traces the inclinations and development of the “I”/poet through interwoven lists of “givens” and “founds,” as if a legend for the reader to the atlas that is to follow in the coming pages. Thus, its conclusion, “I found myself/lost in the stacks of an enormous library.” suggests metaphoric and literal libraries—worlds of great riches in which to roam, to become herself (the finding), and to “lose” herself by entering the many offerings so entirely.
Because the initial poem of the initial section begins with “I,” as did the stand-alone, I think to count how many poems begin this way. Seven. Confirmation of my inference that this collection is a memoir of sorts? After paging through to tally, I decide to log my journey of reading this book as a personal response more than a review.
I need to introduce Priscilla Long before returning to reading. She teaches writing. She crafts poetry, guides, and essays in Seattle. Over the years, I’ve reviewed a number of her books, both non-fiction and poetry: Minding the Muse, Dancing with the Muse in Old Age, Crossing Over, and Holy Magic. With each of those books, and now with this, I’m glad for the close reads required for reviewing. Long’s work merits the focus and delivers intellectual and emotional satisfaction.
Back to the book, a gift to me from the author. For your sake, I won’t comment on every single page because I’d be writing a book.
“River-Mind” (p.8) opens with the title of the first section. The river is time, a time “without a clock” per the epigraph from Gaston Bachelard. The final line, “down to sunless seas” references Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” and its Alph River, and took me on a river-time trip to childhood when I memorized the beginning of that poem and still keep it in mind because of its dreamy beauty and rhythm echoing through Long’s. (After I finished Cartographies…, I add that Long’s poems connect to other poets, to novelists, to activists, to visual artists, to creators of all vrieties.)
Tales of siblings, twinness, unaccountable treatment of brother to sister, in the next poems. Mud shows up in a lot of these. Farm mud, swamp mud, dry mud on rugs.
A terrible accident on the farm. Ordinary times. Bikes. Home-work. Memories of Maryland. Memories of visits to grandparents. Early writing.
I love the staircase that is a “wooden hill” in “Home Away From Home/1” (p. 18), the grandparents’. Noting the “1,” I speculate that in the other two sections of the book I’ll encounter 2 and 3, with chronologies to match, especially because there is also “Brother/1.” And I realize I skimmed the Contents, or I wouldn’t be speculating but I like the anticipation that I’ve read the first poems in a trio. Triptych? What is a poem trilogy called? Triad? Triplet?
Snakes. Milk. Cows. Manure. A transition to Greyhound, cigarettes. I’ve arrived at “Old Maps” with the poet as yet unacknowledged to herself, gone from home, employed, a good shot with a shotgun.
From “A Stone Placed on His Grave” (p.30-31) I learn about the kind and creative existence of McCleary “Bunch” Washington and thank the poet for this education which honors him.
Hmm, “Draft Resister/1” in the second section opposite “Home Away from Home/2.” Some poems are parts of dyads, diptychs … The poet visits this partner in protest, the draft resister, in prison. Prison alters him.
I wonder when Long wrote these poems because at the halfway mark I feel not necessarily nostalgia, which involves longing, but a perspective of looking back with the wisdom of age. Have all the poems been crafted since Holy Magic won the Sally Albiso Poetry Book Award in 2020?
Long left-justifies in free verse, rhyme here and there, narrative throughout.
Near the geographic center of the book, longing appears in “Homecoming” (p. 44) when a decades-gone sister materializes in a dream: “We find ourselves/ a fine café, gab, sip merlot.” Sympathetic grief pangs tighten my chest before I come to “before we found her bones” and “Of her long journey, she speaks/ not a word.” Found and find echo the opening poem of the book with literal and figurative meaning, emphasized by the line breaks after “ourselves,” the sisters together again, whole. And the line break at “speaks” gives me the sister’s voice before snatching it away with “not.” Marie Howe, in a recent Two Sylvias Weekly Muse presentation, addressed directly the power of “not” to give and pull away simultaneously, putting in mind the thing and not-the thing. And her “long” journey, a likely reference to the family of origin. The poet Long selects words with care.
Section 3 begins with “What Happened This Morning,” an announcement of arrival at present day and old age. Long holds fast to memories of mother, lost sister, summers reading, the cosmic rhythm of “The Milky Way whirling…” (p. 52) in “I Remember.” The nouns in “Cellar Poem” (p. 55) catalog “A grammar of chaos and detritus”—forgotten tools and treasures—partially rhyming with “just” and the final “lust” of the hot furnace.
“Here, Now” (p. 56) recognizes the inevitability of death; asserts aliveness.
Six poems go beyond a single page.
“Wisteria” (p. 64) is somehow about me although really about our mortality, about consuming, disappearing—unrecorded, our energies and interests, our projects and practices swallowed by time. “I pick up the Pickwick/ Papers half-read.” Ah, Priscilla, how did you know this is the only Dickens novel I’ve never finished yet twice started and set aside? That Bleak House, the other named Dickens, is a favorite? Yup, I know such plans, like mine to read all his novels, mean something only very briefly. Then, in the next poem, “What I Did one Sunday Morning,” I drink up your rapture (also mine!) over the fog-filled opening of Bleak House.
“I Am Still Here” (p. 68), the last poem, is an injunction: “When I’m gone,/ look for me…” The looking harkens back to the finding of the first and middle poems with that satisfying blend of inevitability and surprise.
Priscilla Long, we will find you again and again right here.
Cartographies of Home, MoonPath Press, 2026, 78 pages
