Some Bright Morning, I'll Fly Away

Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away, St. Martin’s Press

The incredible true story of one woman's journey to relocate the place inside herself where strength, hope, and personal truth reside.

After Hurricane Katrina, Alice Anderson has returned home to assess the damage to her beloved Mississippi coastline and the once-immaculate home she’d carefully cultivated for her husband, Dr. Liam Rivers, one of the community's highly respected doctors.

But in the wake of this natural disaster, a more terrifying challenge emerges as Liam’s mental health spirals out of control, culminating in a violent attack at knifepoint, from which Alice is saved by their three-year-old son. Afraid for her life, she flees with her children.

What ensues is an epic battle―emotional, psychological, spiritual, and legal―for her children’s welfare, for self-preservation, and ultimately for redemption. It’s an unrelenting battle that persists even as life goes on, finally coming full circle when the same son who saved Alice ten years before endures an eerily-familiar violent encounter at his father’s hands. Yet even as she confronts the harsh realities of high-powered Southern lawyers and an inadequate legal system, Alice forges a new life with her blossoming children and an ultimate reclamation of her true self.

The Watermark

The Watermark, Eyewear Publishing

At turns heartwrenching and redeeming, THE WATERMARK explores an American Southern life gone horribly awry. Rich with star–soaked skies and bayou–sodden locales, the poems propel the reader through hurricanes and heartache. Anderson explores the sharp destruction of childhood abuse and the unruly abandon of love and sex, finding grace within calamity. THE WATERMARK draws a map of the human heart, with Anderson its fierce cartographer.

Human Nature

Human Nature, NYU Press

Human Nature explores, both seductively and horrificly, the redemptive possibilities found in an American girlhood gone wrong. Every one of Anderson's poems tells a story—dangerous, sensuous, sometimes crazy, sometimes sacred tales that take us into the heartbreaking reality and strangeness of a little girl who grew up the woman of the house; at once drink-maker, showpiece, secret-keeper, and object of lust.

The terrain of incest and violence sets itself out on the page so subtely and plainly that the poems become mere containers for these extremes, a kind of prayer. Where formal grace might seem impossible, Anderson sings. And this is why the book—with all its darkness and danger—is, in the end, an affirmative one. The poems rise out of childhood's sorrows into a womanhood filled with the past, hell-bent on the future, and ready for a fight. In haunting, elegant verse, Anderson enters into the truth of experience. Through it all, the poems come to embrace those universal illuminations that arise out of—or even because of—suffering.