Lake of our Histories: My poetry collection debut!

Hello Everyone,

I wanted to pop on here and talk about my poetry collection, Lake of Our Histories that will come out January 29th. Pre-sales are going on now. You can order your copy by clicking this link Lake of our Histories or by visiting Finishing Line Press, Lake of Our Histories.

I have had my poetry published before but never in a standalone collection, so I’m really excited about this. Last summer I took social media off of my phone and spent the whole summer reading poetry, listening to poetry podcasts, and learning more about the artform. I signed up for a community called Versed, led by former Harvard Professor, Adam Walker. In addition to hearing brilliant lectures about different works of literature, the community has a poetry workshop where I posted my poetry weekly and people in the community were kind enough to give thoughtful feedback. I owe a lot of my thanks to them.

When I submitted my collection to Finishing Line, I had no idea it would get selected out of the 300 other submissions they received for women’s poetry last fall. The collection features poems about me, my mother, and my grandmother. The poems are organized chronologically from childhood to old age. Each poem could be any of us. The poems are meant to transcend the page to be relevant to every woman who has ever been a grandmother, a mother, or a daughter.

My grandma passed away a year or two before I began working on this collection. The cover started out as a photograph of a Michigan sunset, but then I was visiting my mom one day and she had all of these cool family photos of my grandma, so with her permission four of them were added to this collection. The cover is also one of these photos. My grandma is the second one from the left.

Here are two poems from the collection I will share with you:

This poem serves as the introduction to the collection. I knew I wanted to include it but was unsure as to the placement, since it is autobiographical and chronological. So this poem explains what I’ve done with the collection, carving saints after storms. Making poems or art after fresh hell breaks loose and who is left to clean up the pieces? The women, usually, who sometimes turn pain into art and — voila! Lake of our Histories was born!

Here is one more, the last in the collection…

The first line of this poem was given to me in a dream while I was writing my grandma’s eulogy. This is it’s finished form which I read at her funeral.

Below are a couple reviews I was kind enough to receive from poet and English professor, Katie Hartsock and poet and author Linda K. Sienkiewicz. Katie is the author of the collection called Wolf Trees and Linda is the author of Love and other Incurable Ailments that just debuted.

I thank you for stopping by today and listening to this episode. I do apologize for not being more consistent with these, but because I just started grad school, I have been a little distracted.

I’m hoping that I will get a good handle on, my schedule and reading so that I will find time to do this more consistently, because I do miss uploading episodes. And I thank you all of you around the world who have been listening and supporting my work. Please consider buying a copy sooner than later if you are considering it at all, all of the pre-sales contribute to whatever royalties I get for this collection going forward for the rest of its life.

So, I’m sort of locked in depending on how many copies I can sell during this pre-sale period. Thank you so much and have a good holiday season. Bye-bye.

You can purchase copies by clicking this link: Lake of Our Histories by Brianne Turczynski – FINISHING LINE PRESS

Thank you again for your support!