The Weeds (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781639807949)

Lynn Fanok's The Weeds is an evocative collection of haunting lyrical poems on girlhood and becoming, loss and recuperation, rooted in the specificities of place and the fragility of the natural world. Each poem's precision and musicality, its vivid imagery, contribute to the depth and power of this song cycle. Here's a book you'll want to return to again and again; it's the author's story, but she's made it all of ours too.

-Ethel Rackin, author, In Time

In her vivid collection, The Weeds, Lynn Fanok takes us off the known path into the semi-wild wetlands of grasses, reeds and rushes, redolent with memories of childhood and adolescence, now tempered by the perspective of age. Though only a short distance from the familiar security of home, the weeds taught the poet much about delight and danger. Winding through the book is the presence of a friend who "flew too high, too low, maybe both," and Fanok's desire to "rectify all circumstances that shuttered her light." The poems invite us to make similar journeys, to attend to and query the places that conspired to form our own identities - to consider what still charms us, what haunts us, what continues to mystify and teach.

-Luray Gross, author, With This Body

"A dirt road ran like a secret between us and the weeds. / Our homes on the edge of town..." writes Lynn Fanok in this wistful new collection. Able to distill beauty from the inexplicable, Fanok's poems harbor a small town feel for a place replete "...with mystery, threats..." Within The Weeds, Fanok reminisces about "the Levi's we'd beg our moms to let us buy at Greenfield's on Main Street," and wrestles with the death of a childhood friend, "...found in winter underneath the bridge." In her quest to better understand the past, Fanok maintains a keen eye for language, "Squash ripe purple pokeweed berries..." and later, "...our daydreamer days of cattails, of weedy stalks, of mud and clay." These poems astutely acknowledge that "The wildness around us was not going anywhere."

-Judith Lagana, author, Make Space and Edge of Highway