Joanne Allred is the author of four poetry collections: Whetstone, which won the Flume Press Chapbook Competition, Particulate, Bear Star Press, and The Evolutionary Purpose of Heartbreak, Turning Point Press, and Outside Paradise, Word Poetry Press. She was born and grew up in Utah, but has spent most her adult life in California, where she taught for many years in the English Department at California State University, Chico. Her poems have appeared in many publications including Women’s Review of Books, Prairie Schooner and Quarterly West. With her husband and dog and a lush companionship of wildlife, she lived many in Butte Creek Canyon outside Chico, whose landscape often serves as backdrop and subject for her poems. Her home here burned to the ground in November 2018 in the “Camp Fire.” Outside Paradise chronicles the experience of losing most everything in the fire and beginning again.

Ode to Ella

Because it was a Holiday Rambler Savoy—the 34 foot
And two slide-outs new-to-us trailer—we
Christened her Ella after Fitzgerald, who became famous
Kicking up her heels singing "Stomping at the Savoy.”

Her charms were compact and a bit worn but we were
Overjoyed, my husband and I, to inhabit our own space after
Months of crowding our good-hearted daughter.
Except for no septic capacity and swaying when we walked, she was near perfect.

Admittedly, she became an icebox when it froze outside, and hot as a flapjack
Griddle in summer. She leaked a little in aggressive downpours.
Aztec-patterned throw rugs, a nubby white cover for the
Inexcusably ugly sofa, morning sun streaming through the open door—
Not a dream house but cozy and sweet. A kind of coming home.

As the song titles—each containing the word home —that shape these acrostic poems suggest, Joanne Allred’s OUTSIDE PARADISE is at heart a meditation on home. Having lost her canyon dwelling to a wildfire, the so-called Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise, California, the speaker in these poems finds herself exiled from the life she had been living. How one’s sense of self is entwined with place, possessions, and known pathways, becomes a central inquiry. Is home finally a place or a state of being? As the title’s allusion to the lost biblical Paradise implies, being thrust suddenly outside one’s established life, dispossessed, unveils a difficult human truth: in our separateness from source “we all hunger for some gone primal home.” And so we sift ashes of memory and myth—as the poems in this collection do—trying to recover a sense of continuity, belonging, and trust that a “path that madly ricochets over scorched ground” could lead to wholeness.

Sarah Pape teaches English and works as the Managing Editor of Watershed Review at Chico State. She is the Co-Director of the Northern California Writing Project. Her poetry and prose appeared in The New York Times, New England Review, Passages North, Ecotone, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, Forgive the Animal, was published by Cornerstone Press (2024). She curates community literary programming at the 1078 Gallery and is a member of the Community of Writers. Check out her website for more: www.sarahpape.com. 

Kin

Believe me, we erupt from split roads
and waterways, from truck hitch

and rivet. Born under the upturned. Borrowed
from blackberries, bush-warm.

The earliest places scooped from placental
chicken shit, ghosts in the dust-riled hose spray.

I thought you might be home. Built from fish
scales and plucked dart boards, margarine,

National Geographic spines. Might’ve broke
your dollars for penny candy in brown paper,

rotisserie chicken and pickled pig’s feet.
Did you know the mud-skirted boards,

cracked heels, and softened blacktop?
Were you there snapping geranium stalks,

turning green thorns into scissors? Before
all of this, I had a daddy in corduroys,

hung over his arm, river-caught.
I circled like river sediment, shallow

in the pan till gold shone through. Maybe you
were born at the bottom of something too.

(Originally published by JMWW in May 2022.)