162
2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
YESTERDAY AND TODAY a review by Emily Herring Wilson June Sylvester Saraceno. Feral, North Carolina, 1965. Southern Fried Karma, 2019. —. The Girl from Yesterday. Cherry Grove Collections, 2019.
EMILY HERRING WILSON’s books include, besides the memoir on A.R. Ammons reviewed in the Flashbacks section of this issue, The Three Graces of Val-Kill (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Two Gardeners: Katherine S. White and Elizabeth Lawrence: A Friendship in Letters (Beacon Press, 2002), and North Carolina Women Making History (University of North Carolina Press, 1999). She is a recipient of the North Carolina Award for Literature and the John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities. She lives in Winston-Salem, NC. JUNE SYLVESTER SARACENO was born in Elizabeth City, NC. She received a BA in English from East Carolina University and an MFA in creative writing from Bowling Green State University. She is Chair of the Humanities and English Department at Sierra Nevada University, the director of Writers in the Woods literary speakers series, and is founding editor of the Sierra Nevada Review.
In a frightening summer of a virus that has spread and killed all over the world, especially in America, we have been quarantined with our own fears, held at bay by boredom, but still remaining so very close to our fragile lives. To distract ourselves and pass the time, many readers have gone through their own libraries to reread old books, and I have been grateful that our independent bookstore in Winston Salem, Bookmarks, has continued to fill orders. And then as a gift out the blue, the North Carolina Literary Review sent me two new books by an unfamiliar writer, and I read them the first day. It was glorious to meet a woman living in Nevada with Southern roots and to be in on the births of her new books. I thank NCLR for keeping book reviews vitally a part of their splendid journal and for June Sylvester Saraceno for writing her poems and her fiction. In a time of trouble many readers look for poetry that might save us from despair, at least distract us for a little while. The poets themselves may have moved on, perhaps comforted by their own words (at the least, they worked something out), and we are left to mine their treasures for all the help we can get. In The Girl from Yesterday, new poems by Saraceno, a seasoned writer, editor, and teacher of different forms, I marked up lines that saved the summer of 2020 from a quarantine of boredom and anxiety. We are not alone to fend for ourselves; poets are on stand-by to help us get through. Saraceno’s poems are clear, by which I mean she does not contort her meaning into pretzels of confusion. Still, she inspires me to look twice for more meaning, which I often find. Sylvester knows how to keep our attention. I’ll quote “Night Currents” in full to tempt you to order your own copy from the publisher: Night Currents At the bridge a train passes through my center, a meteor splits the sky into two darknesses, without direction a blue zipper grinds its teeth. When the bike messenger came with our papers we had to tell him he was centuries too late. History had closed the book, the alphabet changed. Now when the river eddies into noirish snakes,
OPPOSITE Main Street looking west, Elizabeth City, NC,
we do not fear it. We still do not understand it,
circa 1945–60
but we care less and less. One day it will empty.