Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Poets and Poems: Jennifer Wallace and “Almost Entirely”


The 1981movie Chariots of Fire includes a scene of the Scottish runner Eric Liddell talking to a group of spectators after a race. Liddell asks a rhetorical question about faith, and running and winning a race: “Where does the power come from?” And he answers it by saying, “The power comes from within.”

That scene kept playing through my mind as I read the new poetry collection Almost Entirely by Jennifer Wallace. The collections 74 poems are about faith in the context of being human and living a human life, and looking within to find what can sustain and grow. As much as we might try, we know that life is not those Facebook happy face emojis. But neither is it the sad face. It is both, and sometimes at the same time.

What Wallace does is to look deeply at what makes us human, and what is within us that keeps reaching for the divine.


To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

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