Synopsis "Homesick, then"
Winner of the 2018 NM/AZ Book Awards in Poetry."Part memoir, part paean to family, ancestry, and place, Nyquist takes us from home to home, from Sweden to Minnesota to New Mexico, and through time, from before her birth to her parents' death. She asks, how do we ever know the full story of those we love? How are we shaped by geography and family history? With tenderness and grace, she bears witness to her parents' growing frailty, their passing and the emotional aftermath. Like going through a wormhole, Nyquist's poems collapse past and present: a telephone call to her deceased grandmother; meeting her parents by chance on the freeway: "I chose them as a portal to this place." Nyquist describes a spiritual and physical closeness to the dead, better than any heaven. She is our medium, calling forth their voices: "flying back and forth, I'm suspended/Mom visits me in the clouds." Her poems are the umbilical cord between the living and the dead. Red sheets, turquoise, red lipstick, frozen strawberries and those unforgettable roses in the snow, the inextinguishable fire. "--Kendra Tanacea, author of A Filament Burns in Blue Degrees
