Julie Babcock
from Rules for Rearrangement
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She shall soon find a way. Gingerbread after an exile. After the funeral pyre
smokes down and the last bread crumbs stolen. How sweet now to have
found this forest
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house, ground cinnamon and ginger, spiced bark and root, a revival. Of course
she eats it. Life belongs to whoever can find it, to whoever
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keeps walking and trying. Children know this. That eating one door leads to
another. That when captured . . .
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She grabs a handful of gingerbread cake, lines her pockets with crispy cookies,
licks icing along a window. She is what she does. She is
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a molasses-dark shape in the trees
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Books
The Wild Out
Novel manuscript out on query. In the Spring of 2019, a burned-out social worker from Cleveland leaves her job to find her missing sister. Her only lead comes from a teen runaway travelling south with a much older boyfriend who believes he can revive his family’s legacy by buying a plantation in Georgia.
Babcock defamiliarizes the defamiliarizing effects of living with grief with heartachingly generous lightness and wit. And the impact is rattling--she makes poetry cave-paint and conjure again, bringing back into being both her beloved, and our attention to the vulnerability of our bonds and bodies.
Megan Levad, author of What Have I to Say to You
Welcome to Ohio, populated by horses and astronauts, wolf moons and changelings. In Autoplay, the American Midwest buzzes with mystery, and our guide is a poet of deft lyricism and graceful wit. So let yourself go, dear reader, because, as Julie Babcock writes, 'To dream is to let go,' and these poems--full of heartache, wonder and awe--dream spectacularly.
Matthew Olzmann, author of Mezzanines