Another Troy

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The recently discovered poetry of a real American teenager and University of Chicago alum growing up just before and during World War II traces the life of Joan Wehlen Morrison as she ages from 13 to 20 through her verse. Joan?s poetry tells a unique ? and true -- story as she loses her innocence due to the impending war and its violent arrival. Along the way she dates a number of boys, reflects on politics and art, and ends up falling in love with the man who would become her husband. Joan offers us more than mere historical color. In her verse, Joan muses on poetry, literature, nature, God, the meaning of life, romance, boyfriends, history, and World War II.

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With growing solicitude at the coming of the Second World War, teenager Joan Wehlen Morrison struggled in her poems to understand the enormous realities of her time while also learning about love and romance, the passage of time, maturity ? topics common to most of us at such an age, but topics troubled profoundly by the hatred and loss and violence of the 1930s and 40s. Reading these poems is remembering with nostalgia what it means to be young and setting out. Sadly, they also echo the deeper question that all of us ? young and old alike ? are today once again forced to ponder: what is to come of us in a world gone mad? In Another Troy, Morrison aches for answers, for truth, in the way only a teenager can.

?Steve Wilson, author of The Reaches

Did you ever own a notebook, and did you open it, perhaps at night, to write about the daily happenings of a world whose pace, magnitude, beauty, and violence staggered your imagination? If so, these poems are for you. Joan Wehlen Morrison?s Another Troy captures what it feels like to be an emerging political, intellectual, and romantic young woman in wartime?when, as William Carlos Williams famously wrote: ?It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/ of what is found there.? The poems in Another Troy see beauty and brokenness and honor both. ?The moon is a bent feather in the sky? in one poem; ?there is an empty orchard in Flanders/Rotting in the rain? in another. Tender and aware, these poems cannot help but imagine foreshortened futures, so that when Morrison writes that the ?wind was like a boy?s breath,? we wonder if the boy is at war, and if he will live to see adulthood. In other poems, the poet scrutinizes her own life, imagining ?this girl in the blue dress and Juliet cap ? / I will be utterly disappeared.? Luckily for us, Morrison?s poems have not disappeared, and when she writes, ?I am a moving window[,]? I feel lucky to have been able to glimpse the world through it.

?Cecily Parks, author of O?Nights and Field Folly Snow

Prepare to be charmed and enthralled by these beautiful, sincere poems full of artistry and verve. Joan Morrison, born in 1922, confronts the realities of war and love in witty and learned verse. ?But darling, platonic as I know we are,/I fear, against all reason, I still want to be/Immensely Epicurean with you,? she writes. Her work transcends the passing seasons of a nation and a life.

?Tina Kelley, author most recently of Rise Wildly and Abloom & Awry