Ripple, Scar, and Story - Paperback

by Karla Huston (Author)

A rattlesnake, a sousaphone, a stolen lipstick, a sorry-looking walleye displayed in a
Sportsman Bar;" are just a few of the keys allowing us entry into the multi-generational
narratives in Karla Huston's book. The poems place their faith in the objects, rites of passage,
and ordinary maladies of the observed world, and move by careful attention and clarity of
expression, toward the discoveries such things reveal. Though the poems are highly personal,
fleshed out in minute detail, the feeling extends beyond the personal. Reading Karla Huston's
lush and lively poems prompts us toward realizing that it's often in the wear and tear, the
weathering, the major and minor scars we bear, that the stories of our lives are most
profoundly revealed.

-Max Garland, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2013-2014, author of The Word We Use for It

I love this book filled with numinous objects of memory and daily life: a grandmother's rolling pin smelling of "Crisco and butter," Father's horns "upright/ silver bass and the curly/sousaphone." Mother's gold bridge, "Now around my neck, / a pendant . . ." I love the sanctification of the lake scape, landscape, of Wisconsin with its "cathedral of trees," and "more lakes than Minnesota," home to cardinals and Sandhill cranes, and frogs and fish. I hold with William Stafford who says, "Our best work derives merely from a continuity of our daily selves." And to Stafford's dictum, I would add the daily selves of our memory, and offer Ripple, Scar, and Story as proof, a terrific book by a poet at the height of her powers.

-Donna Hilbert, author of Threnody

The scars and stories that ripple through this book of gentle poems are centered mainly in the Midwest, with an occasional current reaching as far as California, where the poet lives now. Seeded with notes of resilience, I am Minerva, Athena and Brigit; "moving through memory, The music lived in his head, the tip of his tongue, the records stacked and dusty on the floor;" the majority of these poem focus on the past, back when tennis balls were white. Even-handed, but keen, is the sense of loss that stitches much of this book together. "...when cardinals arrive, They are a visit from the dead....There are no cardinals here. If you return, how will I know?"

-Ruth Bavetta, author of What's Left Over