Sensual, playful, and empathetic, Tallahassee writer Anne Meisenzahl’s first full poetry collection, “Enter Here,” weaves a woman’s life through buoyant storytelling, elegy, whimsy, and rich imagery.
The first poem, “At Fourteen, My Mother Practices Writing Her Future Name,” begins with an act of imagination. Our protagonist’s mother sits at a desk rehearsing her future as someone’s beloved. The fading light that paints a “blurry yellow box on her wooden desk” seems a portent.
Meisenzahl, a retired educator with an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida State University, deftly guides us through the cultural shifts of the 1960s, which can’t be kept at bay as they enter the American home through television. In her “Ode to Mary Tyler Moore,” our speaker, watching her mother watch Moore, finds there “both warning and whispered permission.”
Anne Meisenzahl poetry book, “Enter Here,” is published by Apalachee Press.
In Meisenzahl’s poems, we enter the body with its joys and betrayals. She celebrates it all and even proclaims, “We need to touch one another.”
The cancer poems portray a hospital with its “endless white halls” and doctors who advise, “don’t talk to other women…too many voices, too many choices.” These images may be familiar.
But the astounding description of an imagined “hospital of trees, IV tubes dangling from branches, intertwined with vines and Spanish moss, . . . the space between the limbs where you can see the clouds unfurl like pink bandages against the healing blue” transcends those halls.
Life’s uncertainties live beside its successes. “C-Word,” a playful piece that would surely be a hit in a poetry slam, has nearly sixty C’s in it, with every one of them underscoring the certainty of its speaker’s resolve.
The book offers a whirlwind of vibrant images from around the globe. Meisenzahl’s facility for capturing the senses is apparent here. In a market in Athens, Greece, we see fish “gleaming on ice” and hear fish sellers “bellowing, just as fish sellers have been doing for twenty-five hundred years.” Witnessing the cacophony beneath the Parthenon, the speaker is “stabbed by happiness.”
Meisenzahl, the author of a life skills curriculum for prison classrooms, and “The Open Book: Teaching Poetry in Prison,” also brings us smack down to earth inside creative writing classes held in detention centers, county jails, and prisons. A man cries as he credits Sugar Mama, a therapy dog, for changing his life. Nobody, he insists “should leave this place not knowing how to love.”
In “Two Minutes of Silence,” a prison officer thunders into the sacred space of the poetry room and yells, “Line up for count!” startling the otherwise calm women sitting inside. Out in the hall, they “line up like potted plants,” then return to the room to write their “lightning bright rage” into poetry, refusing “to do as they are told even as they obey.”
We also contend with and celebrate nature. A real tornado, an imagined flood, a dystopic future without trees. In “Saying to Myself,” with its breathless stanzas unfolding images of field, sea, forest, and home, the speaker implores memory’s power to nurture her at life’s end.
The collection goes out with a bang in “Rush,” another breathless plea, this time to grab life with no time to lose: “No mincing of words: hop on for the wild ride. No time for half-baked half-truths, no time for lies.”
This collection leaves us ready to take on the world. Meisenzahl beseeches us in “Watch Yourself,” to observe everything “outside and in, with the penetrating attention of the hawk, the boundless, curious love of a mother gazing at her new babe.”
Meisenzahl’s poems and non-fiction have been published in White Pelican Review, Ars Medica, Georgetown Review, Penumbra, Teaching Tolerance, Snakebird, and Apalachee Review. Her novel “Long Time Gone” was published in 2019 by TouchPoint Press.
Jane Terrell is a writer and graduate of FSU’s Creative Writing Program. Her poetry collection, “Heartbroke and Lucky,” won the 2019 Yellow Jacket Press Chapbook Contest.
If you go
4:30 p.m. Sept. 6: Anne Meisenzahl Book Launch, Midtown Reader, 1132 Thomasville Road
3:30-5 p.m. Sept 7: Anne Meisenzahl Word Garden, Tallahassee Nurseries, 2911 Thomasville Road
6-7 p.m. Sept 11: Anne Meisenzahl & Zach Scott, Blue Tavern, 1206 N Monroe St.
5:30-6:30 p.m. Sept 14: Anne Meisenzahl Grassroots School Meeting Hall, 2458 Grassroots Way
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Anne Meisenzahl’s poems weave urgent life story in ‘Enter Here’