Julie Babcock
author & mid-western shape-shifter
She shall soon find a way
Gingerbread after an exile. After the funeral pyre has smoked down and
the last bread crumbs stolen. How sweet now to have found this
forest
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
keeps walking and trying. Children know this. That eating one door leads
to another. That when captured . . .
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
a molasses-dark shape in the trees
first published in New Poetry from the Midwest
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