This collection recounts the story of leaving America, where the author was born, and of arriving in Australia, where she did not plan to stay. It is a tale of unsettling and resettling, of leaving as an ongoing process. Each micro-scene is a snapshot of time and place – spanning decades and moments, continents and conversations, wars, dreams and kitchen tables – to capture the psychological and spatial tensions between ‘here’ and ‘there’. Leaving New Jersey is a lyrical re-experiencing of putting down roots and tearing them up, an extraordinary poetic account of an ordinary woman's quest for home.
Barbara Kamler’s Leaving New Jersey is a captivating collection of prose poems. These lyrical, deeply moving poems work like sepia-tone postcards where family scenes are honed back to overheard talk, glimpsed expressions, streets and living rooms. The poems invite us, quietly, into the wistfulness and uncertainty that shadows moving from one country to another. Most importantly, the poems reveal a hard-won emotional depth and focus that is at the heart of these indelible, minimalist narratives.
– Anthony Lawrence
This story is full of pain and beauty. Readers with experiences of loss, separation, and the awful dilemmas of parenting will treasure it for its precise honesty. These are the sorts of stories it is difficult to write about,
and it is even more difficult to bring to such stories the shaping sensibility
of a poet. Barbara Kamler’s book is a triumph of honesty and artfulness.
– Kevin Brophy
