Everything abandoned comes alive Pamela Yenser writes in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS Down Home, which becomes an invocation for resilience in a world filled with disaster at every turn: whether it’s the wreckage of flying saucers in Roswell, or a brother and a mother who are irrevocably changed after a complicated birth, or an abusive father who is always in the driver’s seat-whether it’s by plane or car. Yenser does the difficult work of reckoning with trauma and the family / history slamming the lid on truth. And though there’s comfort in escape, and beauty to be found in the landscapes these poems traverse in a wide range of traditional and open poetic forms, Yenser reminds us As long as you live / you won’t forget, and there’s danger everywhere. Lucky for us, we have a wonderful guide who knows her way around language and line, and is cunning enough to have razor blades sewn / into the hem of every poem. -Gary Jackson

Pamela Yenser is a learned poet who knows the context, history, and texts of literature. Here she uses her supple and strict prosody to tell a family story about an abusive, daredevil father, a denying-praying mother, her little retarded brother ( She is her brother’s keeper ) and more. In airplanes and Airstream trailers one catastrophe after another happens to mark a childhood where Visions of the devil / made you tithe, trade in the family silver. This astonishing chapbook delivers one revelation after another in poems exquisitely structured: The past is a trap the Jaws of Life / can’t break, she writes, … but isn’t this the work a poet is meant to do? One poem in exact rhyming couplets is called In the Garden of Demented Parents. Another, also in couplets, ends: Look! I have razor blades sewn / into the hem of every poem. Read this brilliant and triumphant chapbook by a poet who limns the tragedy and triumph of her life. -Hilda Raz

Pamela Yenser’s brave and tender poems spin together family history, personal resilience, and imaginative perseverance sharp as that wreckage/ strewn like tinsel on glitter-/fields of tumbled rock (as she writes in the title poem). Encompassing everything from a bad weather balloon made of Kryptonite to a pineapple/ ruffled doily, Yenser juxtaposes the images and dreams of the otherworldly and the day-to-day life while also writing deeply of love and survival, monsters and angels, magic tricks and memories. This is a captivating and sparkling collection. -Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

Pamela Yenser’s CLOSE ENCOUNTERS refers to, yes, the Roswell UFO, as well as family relationships that are a parallel encounter. The poems’ narrator sees the flying saucer wreckage as a four-year-old. She writes about this iconic disruption of the skies as a way to reveal the workings of memory itself. This is an exciting personal fable that blends journalism, verse, and narration. -Denise Lowe