South Jersey Sand: A Memoir in Poetry (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781639808403)

"Dig deeper," says Jean Feldeisen, and in this book she does exactly that, excavating the sands around her South Jersey roots to find a writing of richness and capacity. With meticulous attention to both the forms of poetry and the truths of feeling, she gives us an archaeology of family history, intense gleams of childhood, shards of love and parenting, and a trove of wrenching but cathartic loss and elegy. Readers will leave the book knowing that they've held a precious vessel, overflowing with life.

-Brian Evans-Jones, former Poet Laureate of Hampshire, UK, and winner, Maureen Egan Award from Poets & Writers

"When you drive, the road goes under the car and comes out the back." Jean Anne Feldeisen's collection takes the reader on an unexpected journey to the South Jersey shore. As the author sorts through the prickly and priceless lives of the Downers, the reader is swept into the "urgent grip of the familiar," and soon crisscrosses his own life, wondering, what is my story, and who will need that story?

-Beth Fox, author, Reaching for the Nightingale (Finishing Line Press, 2024)

With poems as smooth as sand-grains slipping through the funnel of an hourglass, Jean Anne Feldeisen's South Jersey Sand is a poignant exhumation of familial memories seen through a lens that is at once tender, gritty, and unabashedly brave.

-Lauren WB Vermette, 14th Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH and author, And The Form Falls Away (Bee Monk Press, 2018)