Jeri Frederickson

You Are Not Lost Jeri Frederickson

You Are Not Lost peels the soft and hopeful places of young life while expertly making applesauce. Jeri Frederickson uses the familiar scaffolding of a sonnet crown and everyday objects as a channel to nurture love and access beauty while questioning the experiences that hold us together. After life's questions receive unfulfilling answers: "press it down" and "Your future life / is free. No refunds" the poems untangle first-loves, family, and climate change by looking inward, turning the questions over and over as the speaker used to do apples: "Tonight are you the crunching sound? / Are you my friend? I'm not ready to miss you." Jim Daniels, author of Gun/Shy, says of these poems "surprise and sustain, keeping us delightfully off-balance with their sharp wit and surprising vulnerability." Even as trauma stitches through experiences, the collection refuses contemporary trauma labelling as adequate. "I have set my childhood nightmares / a place to rest their leather heads." Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, author of Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge, says "the strength of her poetic voice is a reminder to all who read that within the roots of ancestral wounds, there is space for growth." The speaker in the poems realizes she can't banish trauma or force a resilient narrative. Instead, laughter and hope hold hands with trauma and walk together with the reader, finding their way into the future, not lost.