Commanding the Space of Inner Peace with Poet Deborah Turner
In a slim book of poetry entitled Sweating It Out, author Deborah Turner spans establishing then commanding one’s own space in a world that closes in with demands for us to be other than we are.
Her images maneuver around the opponents of our court of life—those who want us to be what they want us to be. Her lyrics embrace the teammates and our personal hours of practice, determination and play that get us to the goal of being ourselves.
Upon opening the pages of Deborah’s just-released debut book Sweating It Out (Finishing Line Press, 2020), I expect to read poems filled with sports metaphors and stories.
While the sports metaphors are there, they are subtle. Instead, Deborah creates the unexpected—Sweating It Out is a book of meditative moments and epiphany.
Thus, while reading Sweating It Out, I find myself in a breath practice of meditation, self-empowerment, and inner peace.
During the first poem, entitled “Juneteenth,” I breathe in for the families—with ancestors who reach beyond life boundaries—who meet to celebrate the end of slavery in the United States:
Some come for the music.
Some for the something
from nothin recipes,
two, three centuries old,
nourishment like a hug
from the ancestors.
(Turner, page 1, lines 1-6)
I hold my breath during the next poems of silent struggle by youth and adults claiming the space of their own bodies and making tidy their body-encircling areas.
Sensory and gorgeous images juxtapose with terrible truths:
Ruth remembers
orange dust airborne on spring breezes,
dugouts speckled with sunflower seed shells,
the snuff of little league.
That was the second year
girls were allowed to play.
(Turner, “Switch Hitting,” page 16, lines 1-6)
She used to think him
snake-like, shedding
families like skin,
(Turner, “Black Patriarch,” page 7, lines 1-3)
I breath out during “Time Out,” as the poem’s persona understands, through meditation, just where she sits in hegemonic society and how, from that place, she will stand:
And slowly,
one by one, lessons of assimilating
fly up and out the meditation retreat window,
taking with them the good sense your mama made you
promise to use,
until you’ve lifted off the cushioned zafu—
Ever too small for your God-given Black behind.
Mindfully being human
is not what you expected.
Sitting in stillness
you practice
not playing nice.
(Turner, page 11, lines 40-51)
By the last poem of the book, the persona stands to command her own space—beautifully rendered in “When I Arise”—as a “bronze woman I see in the mirror” (page 18).
Stylistically-lovely, compositionally-strong, and content-charged, Sweating It Out is a book that reminds the reader of the importance of being oneself no matter the odds, and “not playing the game” (“Time Out,” page 12).
In the midst of these poems of daring self-reflection, there is another stunning poem that melted me to tears: “From the Lighthouse.” Though dedicated to “all who have dealt with adult onset mental illness,” this poem speaks to anyone who has ever loved someone deeply, then lost that person forever.
With powerful metaphor and in a mere five stanzas, the persona in “From the Lighthouse” sums up the highlights of an entire relationship of love, speaking to the one who has become an absence:
How the vessel grew
big as dawn
to hold your absence
and carry me home.
I don’t need to see the sea to remember
I miss you, still
…
And may you know my love
even as I leave the lighthouse.
(Turner, page 13, lines 17-22, 27-28)
This book of twelve poems can be read in moments. With each reading, one feels stirrings, moving the reader another step toward commanding one’s own space of inner peace.
Quotations: All quotations from Sweating It Out: Poems by Deborah Turner, by Deborah Turner, Finishing Line Press, 2020.
You can hear Deborah Turner read from Sweating It Out at her book launch hosted by Creatives in Conversation, Wednesday, October 7, 2020!
5:30 to 6:45 Mountain Time
Register here for this free event:
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Author Photo by Stephanie Stefanik
About Deborah Turner:
Deborah Turner comes from a long line of tall woman. Her jock poetry emerges, in part, from how coaches quickly spotted and recruited her for basketball, rowing, softball, and track. She played the prior two in college, where she remained long enough to earn degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and a doctorate in information/library studies from the University of Washington. She also served as a Fulbright Fellow in Tampere, Finland.
Although Turner has worked as a librarian, an educator, and a researcher, she now writes poetry and prose full-time in Philadelphia. Her early works appear in the Lavender Reader as well as in anthologies, including the Body Eclectic and Letters to My Sister. Additionally, she blog publishes on her website. Turner now lives with her family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. For more details, please visit her website at www.deborahturner.online.
—from Sweating It Out media kit
Cover Art: Harrison Haines from Pexels
Blog author
Mary Dezember, PhD, is a poet and author of fiction and non-fiction. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature, specialization in Comparative Arts, from Indiana University in 2000, with PhD minors in Art History and Performance Studies.
Professor of English, she teaches Comparative Arts, Art History, Creative Writing and Literature at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Her publications include several non-fiction essays and articles and two books of poetry: Earth-Marked Like You (Sunstone Press) and Still Howling (CreateSpace Independent Publishing). Her novel, Wild Conviction, is in the works toward publication.