Midwest Musings is about the inspiration and the confusion of home, the roots that anchor, and the scattered thoughts on place and identity that escape definition. The poems in this chapbook find magic in the mundane, whether that be in recounting an old story or loving a creek or saving a luna moth. In the end, the poems come to a realization that no matter where you move, the regional roots of home run deep. They run so deep that they tangle in the soil of the self.
Originally from Muncie, Indiana, Heather Frankland currently lives in Silver City, NM where she teaches at Western New Mexico University. She holds both a MPH and an MFA from New Mexico State University and a BA from Knox College. She served in the Peace Corps and Peace Corps Response Volunteer in Peru and Panama. Heather finds herself intrigued by landscapes and the role they can play in language, story, and poetry. She has been published in ROAR, Plane Tree Journal, Sin Fronteras Press, Sweet Lit, Slippery Elm Literary Journal, and others.
As fearlessly self-examining as Heather Frankland’s poems are, they are also elusively stoic and emboldened to hold intimate knowledge of the world–and her relations with others–sacred. Through her exploration of opposing desires to wild or to tame, to teach or to unlearn, to hide or to draw out, to welcome or to warn, to love or to withhold love, or to thirst or to deluge, these dazzling contradictions have been deftly honed into tantalizing poem-secrets.
Richard Greenfield, author of Subterranean.
“I will drench you awake,” Heather Frankland promises, and she does with poems of place and nature that also track the wildness, settled-ness, and sometime wilderness of girlhood and womanhood. From poems to her grandmother that celebrate grit and silence to poems that trace the subversive power of herself as a young woman, Frankland’s poems manage the rare trick of balancing love and family with the tougher territories of alienation and grief in a way that feels earned, authentic, and surprising. “But I am a girl hiding in the field/I am creating a. map of the best places to hide,” she tells us, and we believe her. This is a book to hold in your heart.
Sheila Black, author of Radium Dream.
Frankland’s unique voice brings the ordinary alive. Her keen observations are revealing and honest.
Elise Stuart, author of My Mother and I, We Talk Cat, and Poet Laureate Emerita of Silver City and Grant County.
