You Are Not Lost

You Are Not Lost peels the soft and hopeful places of young life while expertly making applesauce. Jeri Frederickson uses the familiar scaffolding of a sonnet crown and everyday objects as a channel to nurture love and access beauty while questioning the experiences that hold us together. After life's questions receive unfulfilling answers: "press it down" and "Your future life / is free. No refunds" the poems untangle first-loves, family, and climate change by looking inward, turning the questions over and over as the speaker used to do apples: "Tonight are you the crunching sound? / Are you my friend? I'm not ready to miss you." Jim Daniels, author of Gun/Shy, says of these poems "surprise and sustain, keeping us delightfully off-balance with their sharp wit and surprising vulnerability." Even as trauma stitches through experiences, the collection refuses contemporary trauma labelling as adequate. "I have set my childhood nightmares / a place to rest their leather heads." Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, author of Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge, says "the strength of her poetic voice is a reminder to all who read that within the roots of ancestral wounds, there is space for growth." The speaker in the poems realizes she can't banish trauma or force a resilient narrative. Instead, laughter and hope hold hands with trauma and walk together with the reader, finding their way into the future, not lost.