In Portals: A Memoir in Verse, we enter Nelson’s liminal dreamscape into poems populated by Beckett, Godot, Hemingway, even Johnny Cash, who have passed through an aperture filled with light and longing, transfixed in time and space. Portals is a collection filled with moving elegies and profound meditations on the seminal moments when one is transported to another plane via myriad conduits. Nelson’s astute introspection transfigures even the minute moments in life, making this a collection worth savoring and returning to again and again.Kelly Fordon, author of Goodbye Toothless House, a poetry collection, and Garden for the Blind, a novel-in-stories.

Nancy Owen Nelson’s latest book of poetry, Portals, is not to be missed. Her voice rings true in each of its many forms. From her imaginative entrance into the minds and voices of Samuel Beckett and even Venus to moving portraits of her sisters and mother in her personal voice to a fascinating assortment of insightful philosophical ruminations at different periods of her life, Nelson digs deep to bring us this haunting memoir of her life in verse.

Susan Lang, Faculty Emeritus at Yavapai College, author of Running Barefoot, The Sawtooth Complex, In God’s Trailer Park, and a trilogy of novels about a woman homesteading in the southwestern wilderness from 1929 to 1941.

Nancy Owen Nelson’s new poetry collection Portals: A Memoir in Verse, is a wonderful narrative of the everydayness of growing up and living with the history, the good and bad, of the American South. Nelson’s astute poems are filled with the rich sights, sounds, and smells of the deep South as well as other places she has lived and experienced as a military child. This unique and original memoir told through poems captures the essence of the life and times of a talented American poet. Highly recommended!M. L. Liebler, winner of The Oakland / Pen Award for Heaven Was Detroit and co-editor, with Jim Daniels, of RESPECT: Poems about Detroit Music (Michigan State University Press) 2019.