Overview

Here is a full collection of Jeanne Bryners work as an American woman and nurse. Jeanne Bryner asks of us, ""Where are the great studies on buried miners/burned women, displaced steel workers/the lost towns gutted like deer/people left to choose between the river and the sky?"" In this new collection of poetry, Bryner celebrates and mourns those unstudied and unsung. With stunning specificity, she catalogs their courage: the nurse who, from a blue paper cup, baptizes a dying husband; the firefighter kneeling beside the gurney of a toddler; a schoolteacher carrying a disabled child ""down/every/single/step/in those ivory pumps."" Bryner's tender rendering of the unsung reminds us of our fleeting connection between the river and sky. - Geraldine Gorman, co-editor with Paula Sergi for A Call to Nursing, Jeanne Bryner works language, opens it unexpectedly, pries meanings and memories, spins gold from mud, and always hears and speaks the sorrows and hopes of working people. This collection is restorative, an immense and moving achievement. -Janet Zandy, author of Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work

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9781947504455

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"In the epigraph to In Velvet, Bryner quotes ""I could fill you up with stories,"" and then she does, in poems that are like a beautiful, haunting river, a winding force that carries along lives past and present, genealogies of fear and mercy in poems that always return to the source, which is the human heart, the desire for connection, love and grace. Telling the truth is her job as a poet; as a nurse her job is to speak comfort, to hold, to stand by, and especially to perform the sacred human act of witnessing. If you pick up this book, undecided, turn to the last poem and read ""Washing My Sister's Back."" Look up; pause a moment. You have just experienced the unique vision and tender invitation of Jeanne Bryner is a poet of breath-taking imagery, of aching human emotion. You will long remember these powerful poems, how they reveal the poet's heart and deeply inform our own. ―Cortney Davis, author of Taking Care of Time and Daughter"

If you pick up this book, undecided, turn to the last poem and read ""Washing My Sister's Back."" Look up; pause a moment. You have just experienced the unique vision and tender invitation of Jeanne Bryner is a poet of breath-taking imagery, of aching human emotion. You will long remember these powerful poems, how they reveal the poet's heart and deeply inform our own. ―Cortney Davis, author of Taking Care of Time and Daughter In the epigraph to In Velvet, Bryner quotes ""I could fill you up with stories,"" and then she does, in poems that are like a beautiful, haunting river, a winding force that carries along lives past and present, genealogies of fear and mercy in poems that always return to the source, which is the human heart, the desire for connection, love and grace. Telling the truth is her job as a poet; as a nurse her job is to speak comfort, to hold, to stand by, and especially to perform the sacred human act of witnessing. If you pick up this book, undecided, turn to the last poem and read ""Washing My Sister's Back."" Look up; pause a moment. You have just experienced the unique vision and tender invitation of Jeanne Bryner is a poet of breath-taking imagery, of aching human emotion. You will long remember these powerful poems, how they reveal the poet's heart and deeply inform our own. ―Cortney Davis, author of Taking Care of Time and Daughter With a good reporter's precision and a gifted poet's empathy, Jeanne Bryner's latest book, focuses on ""the epic of everyday life."" Here, she recreates the story of her husband, her children, the roof and doors of her house, her unpredictable garden, and her farmer neighbor's crops and cattle. Beneath this deceptively simple tale lies an undertow of sorrow, as well as the frisson of joy and laughter necessary to sustain a long marriage, deep looking, and an engaged life. Like a contemporary Ovid, Bryner uses her considerable powers of metaphor to transform everything in these poems into something else. Here, gulls become boys, small animals become vegetables and people are trees. Even a tree's shadow ""walks in stiff trousers."" Haunted and haunting, Both Shoes Off is a true gift from a wise and accomplished poet, straight from the ""good bones church"" of her remarkable life. --Maggie Anderson

Author Information

Jeanne Bryner's family was part of Appalachia's outmigration from Wetzel County, West Virginia and Greene County, Pennsylvania. Following work, her parents moved to Ohio where her father was hired in a mill. Migration and the fracture of family is never easy. ""Home is the landscape familiar to one's heart and speech patterns gathering on evening's porch."" Due to family illness, she has been a caregiver her entire life. Another layer of migration is the absence of extended family. ""The bodies around you are the ones you lean against; they are your life vest, even if they are babies."" She grew up in Newton Falls, Ohio. A retired board certified emergency room nurse, she's a graduate of Trumbull Memorial Hospital's School of Nursing and Kent State University's Honors College. She has several books in print and her work has been adapted for the stage nationally and also the 2005 Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. She has received awards for community service, nursing, and writing fellowships from Bucknell University, the Ohio Arts Council (1997, 2007) and Vermont Studio Center. With Cortney Davis, she co-edited Learning to Heal: Reflections on Nursing School in Poetry and Prose, Kent State University Press, 2018 which received the Tillie Olsen Award for creative writing from the Working Class Studies Association and 2019 American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award for creative writing. In 2012 her book, Smoke: Poems, Bottom Dog Press, received an AJN Book of the Year award for creative writing. Her book, No Matter How Many Windows, Wind Publications, received the 2011 WCSA Tillie Olsen Award for creative writing. In 2022 with the support of Sigma's International Nurse Honor Society chapter, Delta Xi, she established a Nurse Honor Guard unit in her community. Jeanne lives near a dairy farm with her husband David, a veteran and industrial worker. Her son works in a machine shop and her daughter is a nurse.

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