Description

 

Mixtape: Marginal States

 

by Debbie Hall

The poems in Mixtape: Marginal States bear witness to members of our human family who exist just outside the mainstream of society.  In these portrayals, we see individuals struggling with homelessness, those uprooted from their native countries, such as asylum seekers, and others dealing with altered or challenging psychological states-states which anyone of us might occupy at some time during our lives.  The hope of bearing witness is to foster compassion and inclusion, human needs shared by all.

Early Praise

In the introduction to the poetry anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, Carolyn Forche writes: “We all know that atrocities have taken place on an unprecedented scale in the last one hundred years.  It becomes easier to forget than to remember.” What can one person do? Debbie Hall, in her book Mixtape: Marginal States, shows us: we can witness our atrocities. Mixtape: Marginal States is filled, not with finger pointing, but evidence. As Forche continues, “The poetry of witness reclaims the social from the political and in so doing defends the individual against illegitimate forms of coercion.” Join me, and others in reading Debbie Hall’s powerful poems of witness.

—Ron Salisbury, San Diego Poet Laureate (2020-2021)

 

Debbie Hall’s Mixtape: Marginal States is not for the timid. Rather, it’s for the bold lover of poetry, those who welcome the lyrical of society’s joys and traumas. Those who are willing to delve into the hideous to find beauty, to abandon intellect for intuition. To question, to examine, to remain uncertain, while finding the balance where hope challenges anguish, and the fear of apocalypse is quelled.

—K-B Gressitt, publisher and co-founding editor of Writers Resist.

 

As attested by her bio, Hall’s photographer’s eye has served the reader well in this collection. Indeed, at this fraught period of time, when Orwellian memes punctuate so much of what we consume intellectually, these may very well be the individuals that we most need to meet; to read their stories recorded in a variety of shifting poetic forms by the author. Some of them have names, others we come to know simply as vagabonds: unhoused, unheard, undocumented—all of whom we tend to not see when walking by them. Souls, in the author’s words, weathered to gray dull as the sky overhead. Hall shines a light on all of them, also illuminating the reader with a purpose in mind: for us to come / back to our senses.

—Robt O’Sullivan Schleith, Escondido Arts Partnership and San Diego Poetry Annual Regional Editor   

 

 

 

About the Author

Debbie Hall is a former psychologist whose poetry has appeared in Hawaii Pacific Review, Arlington Literary Journal, Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine, Sunshine/Noir III:  Writing from San Diego and Tijuana, and many other literary journals and anthologies. Her books include What Light I Have (2018, Main Street Rag Books), Falling into the River (2020, The Poetry Box) and In the Jaguar’s House (2022, The Poetry Box), a book of wildlife photography and poems for children. Her essays have appeared on NPR (This I Believe series), in USD Magazine, and the San Diego Union Tribune. She holds an MFA in writing from Pacific University in Oregon and is a poetry editor with Writer’s Resist. Her photography has been published in Orion, The National Humane Review (a 2009 photo contest winner), The San Diego Union Tribune, Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine and in other literary journals.

Instagram: @debbie.hall.poet.photog