INDIANA GIRL

A Midwestern transplant returns to her roots with both nostalgia and poignant realism in a poetic debut memoir.

In an introduction, Curran reveals that “the double lighting strike” of her father’s death and her mother’s increasing dementia brought her back to her childhood home of Orange Township, Indiana, after more than four decades away. The poems and short prose sketches that follow are her attempt to record her emotional journey over the next few years, as she discovered that her long-abandoned home still had a firm hold on her. The work is bookended by two poems, both titled “Once a Place,” which ground the author firmly in the Indiana landscape. Other verses explore her connection to her family and the farm where she grew up. Poems such as “In 1936 Grandfather John Brewer Curran,” “The Great Uncle,” and “War” trace her family history, and “The North Field” and “Sleeping Warm on the Farm” offer more general vignettes of rural life. “Reading Charlotte Bronte” calls up Curran’s childhood and “Red Hats” uses the titular headwear to mingle past and present, tying her early years to her mother’s old age. A series of prose “histories” effectively illuminates the painful side of rural existence, featuring lives marred by poverty, teen pregnancy, war, and early death. Curran’s poetic choices often add immediacy and resonance to her reminiscences, compressing a wealth of memories into vivid images, as in “Hollyhocks,” in which “stalks bend with the weight of flowers / like the backs of old women / bent over a hoe.” She generously expresses her observations in poems such as “Earth and Air,” which presents a lucid picture of a mismatched marriage, and “At Ninety-one,” which captures the frustrations of dementia in lines such as “Yesterday forever is now.” Teague’s simply rendered, black-and-white sketches of farmland and life nicely reinforce the text’s nostalgic tone.

A moving look at the past that skillfully evokes the Indiana farm country and its inhabitants.