Joan Larkin
Old Stranger: Poems.
New Gloucester, Maine: Alice James Books, 2024. First printing. 9781949944648 77 pages.
Softcover volume, measuring approximately 5.5" x 8.75", is new.
"The speaker in "Old Stranger: Poems" begs to be seen and known, even when faced with her aging and her own mortality. Even as we age, there's a looming space for the mysterious stranger we embody without realizing it. Do we ever truly know who we are?
In the book, familiarity takes so many forms, as does the stranger: sometimes the stranger is a loved one, sometimes it is the speaker to themselves, and other times it's one who might seem like a stranger in the poem but turns out to be recognizable in one or more ways. We are looking back, but at the same time we are so much in the present, there's an in-betweenness of the temporal that is so dreamlike and delicious. The poems are suspended and feel weightless even as their subjects are weighty and, at times, dark."