SINGING BACK TO THE SIRENS
Singing Back to the Sirens explores the many ways that desire and love, loss and grief, can shape a woman’s life. The poems in this two-part collection look at the loneliness of a newborn for her sick mother, the first stirrings of sexual desire for a best friend, the treacherous leap from a sheltered world of faith into lesbian life, the frustrations of falling for straight women, the alchemy of falling in love, the aftermath of losing it. In the first section, the poet sings back to the many women she has loved. In the second, she sings back to the one who sang the sweetest and the saddest songs.
Poetry
ISBN:978-1-950730-28-5
Publication Date: March 3, 2020
Singing Back to the Sirens explores the many ways that desire and love, loss and grief, can shape a woman’s life. The poems in this two-part collection look at the loneliness of a newborn for her sick mother, the first stirrings of sexual desire for a best friend, the treacherous leap from a sheltered world of faith into lesbian life, the frustrations of falling for straight women, the alchemy of falling in love, the aftermath of losing it. In the first section, the poet sings back to the many women she has loved. In the second, she sings back to the one who sang the sweetest and the saddest songs.
Poetry
ISBN:978-1-950730-28-5
Publication Date: March 3, 2020
Singing Back to the Sirens explores the many ways that desire and love, loss and grief, can shape a woman’s life. The poems in this two-part collection look at the loneliness of a newborn for her sick mother, the first stirrings of sexual desire for a best friend, the treacherous leap from a sheltered world of faith into lesbian life, the frustrations of falling for straight women, the alchemy of falling in love, the aftermath of losing it. In the first section, the poet sings back to the many women she has loved. In the second, she sings back to the one who sang the sweetest and the saddest songs.
Poetry
ISBN:978-1-950730-28-5
Publication Date: March 3, 2020
Praise for SINGING BACK THE SIRENS
“Taken together, these achingly beautiful and gutsy poems represent an autobiography of love, from early crushes to coming out to a Calvinist mother in a New Jersey landscape and its sea-salt air to the speaker’s erotic coming-of-age—first gay bar, first girlfriend—and finally adult love and marriage, and the marriage’s startling dissolution against the mucky inland lakes and icy realms of Michigan. This collection is unflinching, honest, and spare in its insistent descriptions of grief’s volatility and its silences. DeRitter never bails us out, never shuts the tap on the speaker’s heroic, lavish yearning.”
Diane Seuss, author of Four-Legged Girl (finalist for Pulitzer Prize in Poetry) and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
"DeRitter deftly navigates the many seasons of love and loss. With a brave, unwavering voice--one that is both fragile and fierce--she plumbs what was and what might have been with lovers and brothers, a mother, even the insurance guy at the kitchen table. These poems bellow and purr, moan and praise, enlarging our understanding of love and belonging, and ultimately what it means to become. This is an outstanding and irresistible first book."
Jennifer Clark, author of A Beginner's Guide to Heaven
"'Is it always about longing? / Can I never let it go?' Reading Singing Back to the Sirens feels like finding a forgotten box of photos: vivid, familiar faces and settings, but as you go through them the memories begin to alter. DeRitter's skill in welding place to emotion ensures the reader will experience childhood, adolescence, maturity, New Jersey, Michigan, Provence, passion, longing, regret -- 'the alternating current of there and not there.' By the end there is fire, there is joy, there is breakage, and always there is the lingering smoke of memory."
Susan Blackwell Ramsey, author of A Mind Like This (winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)
About MARGARET DERITTER
Margaret DeRitter is the poetry editor and copy editor of Encore, a regional magazine based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She was a winner of the 2018 Celery City Chapbook Contest, sponsored by Kalamazoo's Friends of Poetry, for her chapbook Fly Me to Heaven By Way of New Jersey. Her writing has appeared in the anthologies Surprised By Joy (Wising Up Press) and Queer Around the World (Qommunicate Publishing) and in a number of journals, including The 3288 Review, which nominated her poem "At the top of Sleeping Bear Dunes" for a Pushcart Prize. DeRitter has also written numerous magazine and newspaper articles. She worked for 22 years at the Kalamazoo Gazette and has taught journalism at Western Michigan University and Kalamazoo College. She was born and raised in New Jersey and has lived in Michigan since college. When not writing or editing, she often paddles Michigan lakes and rivers.
