Calendar - Deerbrook Editions

Endorsements for Calendar

What is this Calendar that does not contain time—that instead explodes it? In Dawn Potter’s Calendar, there is an ordering of months but, inside each, a stunning variety of content, scale, and craft. This is a poet for whom language is music, for whom form is invention. These poems by turns reach toward centuries-old source texts and myths, then spring out of daily observation, meditating on how we matter in a world “that does not know you live in it,” but also on acts as quotidian as doing laundry, as caulking the shower. Disarming and profound, but also wryly, affectionately, even wearily funny, Potter’s speaker is vast—as much a Greek chorus as a next-door neighbor, asking not for a cup of sugar, but rather “Help me figure out how to be human.” What a deeply beautiful book this is—and what a reckoning. “I cannot cure my small life,” Potter’s speaker claims—yet these are poems not afraid to try.

—Kerrin McCadden

Dawn Potter’s Calendar witnesses both the partially eclipsed diurnal (laundry, litter) and the shining counter-quotidian (patience, psalms). Filled with the exquisitely observed flotsam and glory that coat our mortal coils, it’s a collection of plaintive but unsentimental musings, some in dazzling personae. The voice is a high-low mix—the moon “climb’st” while also requesting a hundred bucks through Venmo—that’s also word-thick, with gorgeous echoes of Plath and Celan. Potter’s big-hearted poems “want you to be there and . . . want you to be glad [she] came” and, gosh, I sure am.

—Arielle Greenberg

Dawn Potter is the author or editor of ten books of prose and poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, the Sewanee Review, the Threepenny Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and many other journals. Dawn directs poetry and teaching programs at Monson Arts and lives in Portland, Maine.