THE PIVOT PRINCIPLE

Turner, who’s best known for her role as pilot Maggie O’Connell on the CBS TV series Northern Exposure, offers a combination of poetry and memoir.

The author presents an autobiographical collage about loneliness and its effects. Early on, she stresses the importance of expressing oneself, and then identifies one of several “Pivot Principles” as being “Love and Service,” through which she says that she “realized the best way to help others is with the acknowledgment of my own struggles, coupled with the willingness to share my stories.” Those stories, she notes, employ poetry, which represents “innate passion”; the Pivot Principles represent reason; and “Reflections” represents application. The main story she tells is one of aloneness: After her daughter went to college in 2016, she was living by herself for the first time, she notes, and later stress during the Covid-19 pandemic made her feel deeply isolated. Her poems address such topics as feelings of inadequacy and making connections with God; the Pivot Principles offer guidance, and Reflections show the directions she took in her own journey, which included writing and staging a musical, and she shares that experience with readers. The poetry is the strongest element of the book, which includes such highlights as the melancholic “Loneliness Lingers Everywhere” (“Tick and tock / The edge of clock / Counting down the rest of life / —The best of me forgotten”) and the strong “Confine Her To A Box.” (A foreword by 2010 Texas State Poet Laureate karla k. morton is included.) However, the book’s loose structure makes it quite hard to follow at times, and it lacks a feeling of balance, as a result; each part of the book feels disconnected from the one before, making for a reading experience that isn’t always smooth.

An earnest, personal work that’s hampered by uneven execution.