Outside the Fold, Outside the Frame

by Anita Skeen

This collection of poetry is a chorus of female voices telling stories-stories that show the depth and breadth of female experience. Often the storyteller is outside the mainstream, sometimes by choice, sometimes not, attempting to make sense of the world and her place in it.
Family, friends, ritual, the natural world, and memory weave in and out of the poems, as the storyteller reflects on the human community and the often unspoken emotions...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0870135120
• ISBN13: 9780870135125
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: Michigan State University Press
• Length: 109 Pages

Customer Reviews

This book of poems moves with the land it lives on

(to borrow a phrase from one of the poems) and that land is full of real people(the printer, the coach, the hairdresser, even the muse is real.) It is a pleasure from beginning to end, certainly not in terms of sweetness but in texture of language and story and an internal music. I'm a librarian/poet and am often asked to recommend poetry to the uninitiated and curious. Skeen's poems are complex chords that sound simple. They chart a life, quite ordinary, quite mysterious. The poems are personal and communal and never let the reader feel left out. They are poems that you want to read out loud to someone. Poems that make you feel traveled and value your own ideosyncratic journeys. Which gives the title an appropriate irony. This is not a book to put on the shelf but one to carry around in case you need to get inside the fold.