Dragon in My Purse

Betsy Littrell’s Dragon in my Purse weaves into gold the clutter of contemporary American life, the ambiguities of family, the messiness of homes animated by actual people living actual lives. Littrell’s poems summon an achingly sensual picture of motherhood, give glimpses-almost confessional, at times-into the life of a woman navigating her desires and their cultural and biological roots. The rehearsal of imagined play with a daughter who never was ends with a body crumpled on the floor, with blood and flowers and the scent of baby powder. Sensitive to the magic of the quotidian, the resonances of little moments too often neglected in the rush of our contemporary moment, Littrell testifies to the power of poetic knowledge and its ability to animate the world, to give form to chaos, to create life-or a life-in only twenty-two poems.

-Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. Professor of English & Comparative Literature at San Diego State University and author of Poetry’s Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children’s Poetry (Wayne State UP, 2007) & Strong Measures (Make Now, 2007)

In pastel tones, Betsy Littrell captures the clarity and urgency of care in poems softly wrought and beautifully folded. With meticulous imagery and a sensorium embedded in floral, wood, and crepuscular realms, the poems in this collection move us gently beyond individual self to collective need. From the “memory center” to the “washing wool” to the beloved “freckled face,” these heartfelt songs call us to recall how “the lone pine smells like an entire forest,” how deeply the forest depends on the single tree.

-S$, Penn Sound, 1913, Leave Your Body Behind, The Yesterday Project, Poetry Foundation