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
This book is a song, a fugue, a state of both being and becoming--and it will rearrange your mental furniture.
Sue William Silverman, author of If the Girl Never Learns
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
In a time of great public despair, this is a book that sings and singes grief, to keep us going on, one that can guide us all, back and forth across the veil.
Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of The Second O of Sorrow
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
'We are all twenty-five feet in the air,' Babcock writes. 'Anything could happen. Any of us could break or go to fun.' The beautiful terror shifting subtly through Autoplay will not let you go.
Alex Lemon, author of The Wish Book and Happy: A Memoir
This is a poet of the real and surreal. Or rather, she's discovered a rich terrain between these two points of wonder. Babcock writes of wishing to find a 'gadget' in a store 'that changes time.' But her poems already do that for us.
Marianne Boruch, author of Cadaver, Speak
Anthologies
