View From a Painting

A painting of velvet magnolias — the kind that never wilt — has hung on a hundred walls, and remembers every one.It watched a marriage begin in a mostly empty apartment, the floor the only furniture that had arrived. It held still in a hospital waiting room where the light took no one's side. It hung nine years over a diner booth on Route 66 and was never once looked at twice, and later wore a forty-dollar sticker on a folding table at an estate sale, waiting to find out whether anyone would choose it at all.Across nine linked poems, this narrative collection lets the painting tell the story of every place it has hung, and the small, unrepeatable kindnesses it witnessed there — a door held for a stranger, a regular's order begun before she reaches the counter, a name spelled right on the worst kind of Tuesday. One petal has always hung a little wrong. For years the painting called it a flaw. This is the account of how it came to call it something else.Written in the open-hearted, long-lined free verse tradition of Walt Whitman, A View From a Painting is a debut poetry collection about identity, belonging, and the quiet grace of being seen exactly as you are — and being allowed to stay that way once you have been.For readers of Mary Oliver's Devotions, Ada Limón's The Carrying, and Maggie Smith's Goldenrod — poetry that finds the sacred in an ordinary afternoon.Some things are not fixed because they were never broken.