Daughters of Bone
Daughters of Bone explores the landscapes and people of the South. Drawing on personal and collective history, these poems explore the relationships between place, people, history, culture, and language. Subjects include family and relationships, especially between women of different generations, means of handling grief, and travel and return. Photographs or physical objects often work as keys to memories of events or people from the past. Particular locations or landscapes likewise serve as reminders. This collection questions the meaning of “home” and “family.” It mythologizes the author’s own history as she searches for her place within it.
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What reviewers are saying:
"Daughters of Bone strikes me as a claiming: of self, of personal history, and of the voice to speak of these things. Few poets have the ability to simultaneously evoke the particularities of their own lives and draw a reader in to make it hers as well, but Jessica Temple made me feel welcome, at home in these poems. I know these women, and I know these places. Temple’s intense engagement with words and their histories reveals how we make the world with the stories we tell, and with the beauty of their telling."
—Jennifer Horne, Poet Laureate of Alabama,
2017-present and author of Borrowed Light,
Little Wanderer, and Bottle Tree
"The South is both a place and a feeling, and Jessica Temple constructs that entity on the page with a raw and curious eye in Daughters of Bone. The lost mother, questions of family lineage, and even a dip into Grimm folklore make up some of this book’s themes, which feel all at once like memoir and verse. Temple’s willingness to see her South and her life with poetic finesse is well worth the read!"
—Ashley M. Jones, author of dark / / thing and Magic City Gospel
"Jessica Temple’s poetry demonstrates an expansive energy and a soulful joy, the eternal issues of sorrow and death, as well as an impressive representation of place, family, and nature. Her language and consciousness render an unmistakeable and beautiful poetic voice. Again and again, there are striking lines of aural delight."
—Sue Walker, Poet Laureate of Alabama, 2003-2012,
editor and publisher of Negative Capability,
and author of Blood Will Bear Your Name