Publisher: Modjaji Books, South Africa
Fall Awake is a study in contrasts, exploring belonging
and unbelonging; tracking the coming to terms with a fluid sexuality,
and examining how relationships work or don’t work. Jeannie McKeown also
confronts head-on the terrifying life-changing experience that is
motherhood. Sometimes irreverent, always heartfelt, the poems in this
collection speak to a particular life, and to what it is to reach the
middle of one, and still find yourself with new horizons and more to
learn.
£17.00
About the author
Jeannie Wallace McKeown lives in Grahamstown, and works full-time at
Rhodes University in support services. She has an MA in Creative Writing
from Rhodes, and has had poems published in New Coin, New Contrast,
Stanzas, Poetry Potion, Aerodrome and various other literary journals.
Her work appears in the anthologies Voices of This Land, For Rhino in a
Shrinking World, the EU Sol Plaatjie collections VII, VIII and IX, and
on the AVBOB Poetry website. She is a mother of two young teenagers, has
just the perfect number of cats, and a dog who wasn’t planned but is
now an integral part of the family.
Review
“Here
are poems about the moments and details of a life. Poems about oxblood
boots, about love and its intensities, about feeling ripped in half
after a birth, and revelling in a son’s discovery of dust motes. Poems
about divorce and about loving women, at being surprised by a love for a
man who will become an ex-husband. The outside world peers in with
poems about flaming aeroplanes going into towers. These are poems where
ordinary moments become extraordinary through their telling in soft,
flowing lines.”
Arja Salafranca, author of Beyond Touch and The Thin Line
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