Annie: How She Came to Be

Another fine book from Meat For Tea Press.

Annie, a traveler, arrives from time’s nowful shoals, staking her claim at the intersection of mystery and motion. These poems are a song of soft whisper memories. Part confessional, part spell, they hint at an honest path through the life of Linda Chown and her beguiling creation. Somehow, they also manage to be the story of every woman I ever loved. Try holding onto her and she disappears into the puff from whence she came. I will return to these poems again and again, not for answers, but communion. I will return to better understand the questions that matter.

-Jeff Weddle, winner of the Eudora Welty Prize and author of Driving the Lost Highway.

“Try not to know too much at the beginning,” Linda E. Chown advises in her intimate short poetry collection, Annie: How She Came to Be. Chown’s “Annie” walks through time, Padua, Montana, Kathmandu, Monterey Bay, Paris, Capitola—turns “her head toward Cordoba …to sing life-lifting Saetas...” Chown effortlessly pairs unexpected imagery and wording to move the familiar into the profound—“She knew answers came out / Delirious and direct like muffins rising...” In the tradition of Emily Dickenson and E.E. Cummings, full of gumption and purpose, Chown’s work builds a beautiful poetic bridge toward a universal anchoring of the self—“[knows] purply that “why” is not a question / But an answer coming forth deeply."
-Jane Muschenetz, author of All the Bad Girls Wear Russian Accents

Starting with a famous quotation from Anne Frank, this collection of themed poems is a rich imagining of many "Annies" - whose lives and thoughts are contrapuntal, surprising, and often arresting. The reader will be entranced at Chown's choice of language and clever, sometimes irreverent images -- memorable and original poetry.
-Linda Kraus, author of Popcorn Icons

Linda Chown’s new chapbook Annie, How She Came To Be is a tightly-knit and intimate offering in which strains of Lucille Clifton, Edgar Lee Masters and the tender tough tone of Mae West can be heard through Annie’s “soft whisper memories,” which pose calmly compelling questions for which “an answer coming forth deeply” satisfies the reader on several lovely and moving levels. In this artfully concise and emotive narrative, Chown has found “Just the right walking stick” with which “To mourn losses” and stir, honor and conjure the secret life which lurks just below the surface of all of us.
-Connolly Ryan, senior lecturer at UMass’ Commonwealth Honors College