HOMESCAPES

by Lee Woodman

Overview

Home is a relative term, especially if you have grown up overseas. In HOMESCAPES, Lee Woodman takes us from an Indian village to the edge of Tibet to a small town in New Hampshire. An audience with the Dalai Lama touches her spirit; questions from an American high school homeroom teacher challenge her wit. Lee never stops searching for what it means to be American, digs deep to understand her New England roots, and ponders intimate relationships, persistently asking, “Where—and what—is home?”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781646622139
Publisher:	Finishing Line Press
Publication date:	05/22/2020
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.17(d)

About the Author

Lee Woodman is the winner of the 2020 William Meredith Prize for Poetry. Her essays and poems have been published in Tiferet Journal, Zócalo Public Square, Grey Sparrow Press, The Ekphrastic Review, vox poetica, The New Guard Review, The Concord Monitor, The Hill Rag, and forthcoming in Naugatuck River Review. A Pushcart nominee, she received an Individual Poetry Fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities FY 2019 and FY 2020. Her poetry collection, Mindscapes, was published by Poets' Choice Publishing on January 9, 2020.

Table of Contents

INDIA

Road Trip to Nilokheri 1

Murder at Nizamuddin 3

Two Dinners at Eight 4

Tommy at the American Embassy, New Delhi 5

Jaya the Ayah 6

A Pillowy Bosom 7

Rolling Socks with Jacob John at Edward Elliot Road 9

Waiting on the Wall in Delhi 11

First Bike 13

Home Leave 14

Dancing at the Ashoka Hotel 15

His Holiness 17

Climbing the Rohtang Pass 18

AMERICA

Coming Home to New Hampshire 21

Homeroom Ghazal 22

Summer Prelude 23

Afternoon Traditions 24

Betula Papyrifera 25

Old Time Fair, New Hampshire 26

Weekly Flea 27

Trees have Longer Lives 28

Father’s Roll Top 30

End of Season 32

Benumbed 33

A Mulch Pile Prayer 34

Found in a New Hampshire Cottage 36

STEREOSCOPE

Ruby Necklace 41

Understood Pasts, Untold Futures 42

Family Cabin 43

Can My Two American Homes Relate? I Eavesdrop… 45

Snowporch 47

I Wish I Had Asked More about Priscilla 48

From the High Shelf 50

Nursing Home in New London, NH 52

Visit to Varanasi Forty-Seven Years Later 54

Homescapes 55

Thanks 57

Editorial Reviews

Lee Woodman takes us to life in India and then to New Hampshire—with precise detail—so we are there, with no limit to the richness of story or the paradoxes of each place. The light brought to thought is language, and Woodman charges hers with imagination and cultural signifiers. We’re not mere witnesses; we experience land as seen by this poet. This book is a distant mirror of two worlds, from the fragrance of foreign oils to “fresh white milk and bracing air…” brought beautifully vivid and close.

—Grace Cavalieri, Maryland Poet Laureate

Read Lee Woodman’s Homescapes and get an intimate and passionate picture of what it means to grow up in two vastly different cultures—Indian and American. Having lived in both for many decades myself, I testify to the poet’s authenticity and vision of harmony that makes sense in today’s fractured world. A well-timed book!

—Natwar Gandhi, Chief Financial Officer, Washington, DC (2000-2013) and author of Still the Promised Land (Arch Street Press, 2019)

From the Publisher