Here’s Nina MacLaughlin’s Boston Globe’s review: (6/28/23)
The intimacy of home in Maine-based poet’s new collection
“A good house is a used place/ turned over and passed on/ a place of winter noons/ layered like the cemetery/ with strange names.” So writes Maine-based Franco-American poet Jeri Theriault in her latest collection, “Self-Portrait as Homestead” (Deerbrook). These are poems of houses, of the places lived in that live in us, and they draw from Theriault’s upbringing in Waterville, Maine. “Fences tilt toward the river like thirsty horses/ and houses lean/ toward one another shrugging as if to say/ it’s pretty good here. It’s okay.” There’s a resignation here, and a sense, too, of resistance against the reins, of knowing one’s place and wondering, at the same time, what else? What more? Here, the house is the home, the house is the body, and Theriault wrestles with its limits, its time-wornness, its continuation in the attics of memory, in the ocean of memory. She writes of the factories where her ancestors worked, where they “inhaled dirt and weed killer,” and about the “stories exhaled” when breathing was dangerous, “all of them makers/ of their own lives.” There’s a force and delicacy to Theriault’s language, a precision of sound and meaning, as when we read the phrase “moth-soft dusk” and know the exactness of the time; in three words she captures its total sensory experience. As a whole, the book, though rooted in a specific time, place, and culture, speaks to the intimate world of our domestic lives. “I want so much from the past and isn’t a house a harbinger/ of future endings?”
Juliana L’Heureux gives a shout-out to Self-Portrait as Homestead in her column “Franco American News and Culture” hosted by THE BANGOR DAILY NEWS. Read her post here. (July 8, 2023)
Juliana’s favorite poem of the collection is “My Father on Iwo Jima.”
Leslie Ullman has this to say about Self-Portrait as Homestead:
Every gesture flies off the page in its caress of language, also evoking the iconic loneliness of women in the speaker’s past and in history itself. The result? A redemptive empathy for self and ancestor, the well-earned gift of a generation of women who have paid the price of breaking free and now step forth to bear honest witness and break old patterns. Such stories cannot be told often enough. These poems do so bravely and in searingly honed phrases and images.
Video-poems from Self-Portrait as Homestead:
“On Returning to my Childhood Church after My Father’s Funeral”
