Fall Awake
Jeannie McKeown
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.
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Fall Awake
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.
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 2nd Edition, 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 teenagers, has just the perfect number of cats, and a dog who wasn’t planned but is now an integral part of the family.
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.