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<\/p>\nSensual, playful, and empathetic, Tallahassee writer Anne Meisenzahl\u2019s first full poetry collection, “Enter Here,” weaves a woman\u2019s life through buoyant storytelling, elegy, whimsy, and rich imagery.<\/p>\n
The first poem, \u201cAt Fourteen, My Mother Practices Writing Her Future Name,\u201d begins with an act of imagination. Our protagonist\u2019s mother sits at a desk rehearsing her future as someone\u2019s beloved. The fading light that paints a \u201cblurry yellow box on her wooden desk\u201d seems a portent.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t be kept at bay as they enter the American home through television. In her \u201cOde to Mary Tyler Moore,\u201d our speaker, watching her mother watch Moore, finds there \u201cboth warning and whispered permission.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Anne Meisenzahl poetry book, “Enter Here,” is published by Apalachee Press.<\/p>\n
In Meisenzahl\u2019s poems, we enter the body with its joys and betrayals. She celebrates it all and even proclaims, \u201cWe need to touch one another.\u201d<\/p>\n
The cancer poems portray a hospital with its \u201cendless white halls\u201d and doctors who advise, \u201cdon\u2019t talk to other women\u2026too many voices, too many choices.\u201d These images may be familiar.<\/p>\n
But the astounding description of an imagined \u201chospital 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\u201d transcends those halls.<\/p>\n
Life\u2019s uncertainties live beside its successes. \u201cC-Word,\u201d a playful piece that would surely be a hit in a poetry slam, has nearly sixty C\u2019s in it, with every one of them underscoring the certainty of its speaker\u2019s resolve.<\/p>\n
The book offers a whirlwind of vibrant images from around the globe. Meisenzahl\u2019s facility for capturing the senses is apparent here. In a market in Athens, Greece, we see fish \u201cgleaming on ice\u201d and hear fish sellers \u201cbellowing, just as fish sellers have been doing for twenty-five hundred years.\u201d Witnessing the cacophony beneath the Parthenon, the speaker is \u201cstabbed by happiness.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201cshould leave this place not knowing how to love.\u201d<\/p>\n
In \u201cTwo Minutes of Silence,\u201d a prison officer thunders into the sacred space of the poetry room and yells, \u201cLine up for count!\u201d startling the otherwise calm women sitting inside. Out in the hall, they \u201cline up like potted plants,\u201d then return to the room to write their \u201clightning bright rage\u201d into poetry, refusing \u201cto do as they are told even as they obey.\u201d<\/p>\n
We also contend with and celebrate nature. A real tornado, an imagined flood, a dystopic future without trees. In \u201cSaying to Myself,\u201d with its breathless stanzas unfolding images of field, sea, forest, and home, the speaker implores memory\u2019s power to nurture her at life\u2019s end.<\/p>\n
The collection goes out with a bang in \u201cRush,\u201d another breathless plea, this time to grab life with no time to lose: \u201cNo mincing of words: hop on for the wild ride. No time for half-baked half-truths, no time for lies.\u201d<\/p>\n
This collection leaves us ready to take on the world. Meisenzahl beseeches us in \u201cWatch Yourself,\u201d to observe everything \u201coutside and in, with the penetrating attention of the hawk, the boundless, curious love of a mother gazing at her new babe.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
If you go<\/p>\n
4:30 p.m. Sept. 6:<\/strong> Anne Meisenzahl Book Launch, Midtown Reader, 1132 Thomasville Road<\/p>\n 3:30-5 p.m. Sept 7: <\/strong>Anne Meisenzahl Word Garden, Tallahassee Nurseries, 2911 Thomasville Road<\/p>\n 6-7 p.m. Sept 11<\/strong>: Anne Meisenzahl & Zach Scott, Blue Tavern, 1206 N Monroe St.<\/p>\n