Kelle Groom uses all her poetry chops in her new “A Memoir-in-Essays” called How to Live which was published by Tupelo Press in October. In these essays, she continues her quest for “home” in physical travels and travels of the mind (a journey she started in her previous memoir I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl). Many of the essays read like meditated prose poems with their detail-rich imaginings. Each essay is situated by the name of a place and marked by a year. (David Trinidad has written that Ginsberg told him to make sure he dated all his writing.) These places and dates serve as touchstones of a life much like a scrapbook of yesteryear, if scrapbooks could conjure such profound interiority. The essays take us all over the United States—from rentals to artist colonies, to houses now lost. (Think Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.”) Groom revisits the child she lost and a doomed romantic engagement with heart wrenching precision. But there is also engagement with the outside world—especially well done in “This Used to be an Ocean” which discusses fracking in Buffalo, Wyoming. Part journalist and part journalist of the soul, Groom gives us an inside look at one woman’s navigation through our troubled and glorious world.
Congratulations, Kelle!
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Author: Denise Duhamel
![On Richard Rodgers’s birthday [from the BBC Proms 2010: The “Carousel Waltz” and other great Rodgers & Hammerstein Songs]](https://writersdepot.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/eaemq2Ck6mI-768x432.jpg)
