PALM TO PINE
Author: Thibodeaux, Sunnylyn
2011
978-0-9821600-5-3
twelve dollars
In PALM TO PINE, Sunnylyn Thibodeaux taps community as its source: the community of things present, of light and sound, of memory and imagination. These poems explore the collected senses of the day-to-day while telling the tale of another place, as if in time travel, inviting the reader to come and go with and partake in the toast.
“Sunnylyn Thibodeaux is a stubborn, resilient poet who has brilliantly turned these qualities on their heads in a quicksilver serenade of the day (cold wine and treasure hunts) and its discontents (poisonous elephant ears). She seems to have made a handshake deal with things as she sees them: You be yourself and I won’t pretend you’re otherwise. And so she is herself in the eyes of the book in your hands. Rare that a poet is so always herself, to the point that we could (almost) take her place, certainly her side, as she vanishes into her lines.”
Julien Poirier
“Walk, look, listen—do all three— keeping your senses open, be aware. What’s going on around you is the stuff poems are made of. Glimpse it. Watch that flowering happenstance you nearly passed over disappear towards whatever near-missed chance you are eternally a part of. That’s what the enamored term ‘luck’ and what the touched recognize as ‘fate.’ In PALM TO PINE Thibodeaux kills it. Her lines grab the reader with certitude there’s no doubting. Her work demonstrates that ‘the ear,’ gladly, is not a dead concept. Think dredged up fears lain down alongside hoped for wishes. Something in line with the massacre-by-snake that Harry Crews dreams up for his looking-for-it fanatics in Feast of Snakes. Only here Thibodeaux reassures that sacrifice—while not quite bloodless—isn’t deadly and does, after all, entertain future life.”
Patrick James Dunagan
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