Most poetry news during the month of June got drowned out thanks to Lexington Poetry Month. One such newsworthy event was the release of Nettie Farris’s chapbook, Communion.

While Nettie has been published by Accents Publishing in our anthology Bigger Than They Appear, we have also published a great deal of Nettie’s work thanks to Lexington Poetry Month. In fact, Nettie was one of our largest contributors, sending in 29 of her 30 poems for the month of June! If nothing else, this accomplishment deserves a round of applause.

For those wondering about Communion, here are some recommendations from the poetry community:

These poems tell the love story of s., a shy everyman who excels at tic-tac-toe and loves small, moist dumplings and n., a right brained everywoman who reads Wittgenstein and Anais Nin and prefers large dumplings.  Somehow they make it work.  In these big-hearted, clear-eyed, short-lined gasps, Nettie Farris grasps that the key to dilly-dallying is to sigh into little poems, to amuse oneself with a pink balloon from time to time, and to pursue the Rosetta Stone to someone else’s heart.
.                                                                      –Tom C. Hunley

Each sparse poem moves the tale forward, nuance by nuance, through the first flush of attraction, through joy, disappointment, discovery, disillusion and betrayal: a unique telling of a universal tale.
.                                                                           – Ann Howells

Nettie Farris is able to take daily motions and simple objects and, through her careful language, ignite moments of intimacy that are simultaneously physical and spiritual. Each poem in the book works on its own, and together they form a narrative of the slow, lovely emergence of one life entwined with another.

.                                                            – Bronwyn T. Williams

You can find Communion available here, at the Morris book shop, or anywhere else Accents books are sold!

Nettie Farris teaches writing as an adjunct instructor, roams the grounds of Mount Saint Francis Nature Sanctuary with her dog, and hikes the Millennium Trail at Bernheim Forest. Her work has appeared in the anthologies The Dark Woods I Cross: An Anthology of Contemporary Louisville Women Poets and Bigger Than They Appear: Anthology of Very Short Poems. She lives in Floyds Knobs, Indiana with her husband and three sons.