Description

A Girl, Her Slipper, and Yesterday’s Rainbow

by Allison Thorpe

Designer’s Choice, The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2024

A Girl, Her Slipper, and Yesterday’s Rainbow explores escape and memory. Discovering no Cinderella footwear in the alcoholic environment of growing up, a girl runs off to the freestyle chaos of the 1970s before seeking asylum in quiet country living. After her husband’s death, she retreats to the city but discovers you can’t hide from memories. With acceptance and humor, these poetic musings paint experiences familiar to so many.

Early Praise:

In this evocative collection, Kentucky poet Allison Thorpe weaves a tapestry of memory, changing place, and belonging. With a keen eye for detail and a voice that resonates in both its tenderness and rebellion, Thorpe invites readers through the field of my history, yesterday’s rainbow a riot of weeds.

Thorpe’s poetry vibrates with the tension between roots and developing wings, spanning rural landscapes and city environs. Her vivid language brings to life a place where memories rise like party balloons, a testament to the power of place in shaping identity and the pull between “home” and our wider worlds. Her verses craft a poignant exploration of what it means to leave, to stay, and the unseen forces that shape our perceptions of place and self, offering a lyrical reflection on the complexities of longing and becoming, times where each night we charted the stars with our farewells.

—Shaun Turner, poet and editor

The poems in Allison Thorpe’s brilliant, new chapbook literally bring the reader to a point that teeters the fluid and the frozen. A Girl, Her Slipper, and Yesterday’s Rainbow balances on the palpable tension between a life tethered to family and its messiness and the untethered life of free-spirited and unpredictable adventure, bringing the book its energy and its dramatic core. In the poems, the speaker comes of age through discovery, journeying from thoughts of herself as street clutter to the experience of thrills mothers warned about and on to the maturity of feeling happy just to be a knobbly goddess. In these poems, Thorpe keeps us guessing by changing from her usual lyrical countryside venue to a kaleidoscope of settings and poetic forms. The surprising anecdotes, the inventive language, the speaker’s honesty, all these give these poems an almost supernatural quality, balancing the reader on the virtual tightrope of life.

—Nancy K. Jentsch, author of Between the Rows

Through A Girl, Her Slipper, and Yesterday’s Rainbow, we take a journey alongside a girl who is the daughter of a father who was captain of the drink/A flagging ship in a whiskey sea and a mother who snuck Newports and danced to Billie Holliday with arms fluid as liquid persuasion. I say “alongside,” but I felt as if I was inside of this girl—that I was this girl—so visceral is the portrait created by poet Allison Thorpe. A girl, simple as a sidewalk, who is lured to leave the dark things congregating within her Tenth Avenue Normal and head west with a girl with ears slathered in dazzling dots. A girl who forgot the language of snow as Arizona sun converted/ the crust from my northern bone / into orange smoothies and halter tops—who becomes a woman who loves/ to stare into the sky/ as if it were an oracle. Throughout this stunning collection, Thorpe turns to nature to make sense of the girl’s world. Even as the girl-turned-woman moves to the city and tries on different “slippers” (Jimmy Choos), she can’t resist waving to a “suspicion of crows” (strutting the pigeon roof like princes) from her urban balcony, just in case. Thorpe’s masterful use of the organic transforms the inexplicable—but highly relatable—into something I could touch and, more importantly, feel deeply.

 —Missy Brownson, author of Hush Candy

About the Author

Sylvia Ahrens (writing as Allison Thorpe) grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan. After adventuring around the country, she and her husband settled at the end of a lovely dirt road in Kentucky where they built their own home of natural stone and wood, raised a family and an organic garden, and reveled in bird song for almost four decades. Along the way, she earned degrees in English Literature, Creative Writing, and Women’s Studies. Her books include six collections of poetry and a series of cozy mysteries.

Inspirations include the growly screams of Janis Joplin, the enduring courage of Aung San Suu Kyi, the complex melodies of Bela Fleck, and the beautiful finality of the Oxford Comma. She works as a writing mentor at The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, loves lilacs, yearns to be a poker star, and lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

Learn more at allisonthorpe.com