Joanne Harris Allred
Joanne Harris Allred is the author of four previous poetry collections: Particulate (Bear Star Press), The Evolutionary Purpose of Heartbreak (Turning Point Press), Outside Paradise (Word Poetry Press), and Whetstone, which won the Flume Press Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in many publications including Women’s Review of Books, Prairie Schooner, and Quarterly West.
She was born and spent her early years in Salt Lake City, Utah, but has lived most of her adult years in Northern California where she taught in the English department at California State University, Chico.
With her husband, Jerry, three children, many dogs, and several iterations of chicken flocks, along with a lush companionship of wildlife, she lived many years in Butte Creek Canyon outside Chico. Their home here burned in November 2018 in the “Camp Fire.” Outside Paradise chronicles the experience of losing most everything in the fire and beginning againa.
She now splits her time between a coastal community in Humboldt County, California, and Butte Creek Canyon. The landscapes of both places inspire, backdrop, and are often the subject of her poem
Friends, You Drank Some Darkness: $16.99
Poem from Friends, You Drank Some Darkness
Postcard: Ide Adobe, Red Bluff, California
The past collects behind a locked door and windows I can barely see through—water-spotted, dust-streaked, like the desert this wagon jounced across for weeks to get here. Burning with the slap of bare seat planks, a man and woman rattled forward into this frame where, mining mud from the riverbank, they built the small adobe. Evening light gilds the air like a daguerreotype. Circling the cottage with my camera I find a broken pane offers the best composition: more tragic than the shapes our easy lives are measured by, less assured than a flutter at my wrist the cutting edge defines. I want to reach in, finger the stained chintz curtain, wipe clean a lens fogged by the breath.
