Lessons on Sleeping Alone

Lessons on Sleeping Alone is a beautiful, vibrant saga of a woman caught between the perfection of mythology and the loneliness of one-night business-meeting hotels...a fulfilling sequence of poems exploring the sensual awareness of the individual trying to find "self" amidst the promise of "kitsch and kinship."  It is filled with stark, sometimes shocking imagery that goes direct to the soul where, as Megan writes, "metaphor is fact and symbols are simply accessories we hang around our throats."  I recommend it.  

                    -- Jared Smith, Poetry Editor of Turtle Island Quarterly

 

There is blood in these poems, and flesh as well. From conception to death, from LA to the Arctic to Colorado, Freeman finds the angles to deal with subjects from Greek tragedy, an email inbox, the operating room, and, yes, sleeping alone. Freeman fearlessly probes that life that sustains life for: “Our chemical selves in all our juicy mess leave trails of truth shimmery as any snail’s.”

                   -- Robert King, Director of the Colorado Poets Center

 

In Megan E. Freeman’s passionate and intelligent collection of poems, Lessons on Sleeping Alone, the movement is that of coming into the open, of claiming space. Poem by poem, the poet’s voice emerges as “individual, recognizable, distinct,” words from poet Jane Hirshfield’s essay on originality in Nine Gates. The insights that inform this collection come to a hard-won place that is, in an early poem, identified as “You Are Here.” But here has become a more deeply owned and different place.

                  -- Veronica Patterson, Colorado Book Award Winner for Poetry