by Heather Wyatt

Call My Name by Heather Wyatt is a collection of poems from the voice of a small-town southern woman working through relationships with her family and discovering who she is along the way. She writes of loved ones who have departed and her sometimes broken spiritual life. From pimento cheese sandwiches to walks in nature, this collection is inherently southern. With moments of both humor and heartbreak, she not only shares her struggle with body image, but takes us on a journey of love and loss, with each poem revealing the story of a woman simply wanting someone to call her name.

About the Author

Heather Wyatt is a teacher and writer by day and food TV junkie by night. Her first book, My Life Without Ranch from 50/50 Press features that love of food, but also explores the dangerous relationship we can all have with it. She lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and has a slight obsession with her two dogs. She both graduated from and instructs English at the University of Alabama.

She received her MFA from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky in poetry. Several of her poems have been featured in a number of journals including Number One, Puff Puff Prose Poetry and a Play, The Binnacle, ETA, Writers Tribe Review and many others. Her short story “A Penny Saved” was published in Perspectives Magazine in 2018. Her essay “Self-Defense” is in The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, September 2018 and her essay, “Hot AF” is in the magazine Robot Butt.

Follow her on Twitter @heathermwyatt or visit her website at heathermwyatt.com for more information.

What They’re Saying…

“and give them / no chance to ignore me.” The power and danger of seeing and being seen is at the core of Call My Name. The title of the collection is both a tender prayer and an unflinching demand. In Call My Name, Heather Wyatt shows herself as a lyric poet daring enough to show her true faces to the world—faces that reflect wonder and humor and joy and anger and loss. But more than anything, these faces serve as proof of the poet’s willingness to bare herself to the world and dare her world to do the same.

~ Jason McCall, author of Silver,
I Can Explain, and Dear Hero

Heather Wyatt’s poems take a second look at things, as if she were re-evaluating her experience. With humor and precision, whether she is exploring childhood memories or re-imagining a recent walk with her dog, she gives us the real details, the key images that resonate.

~ Greg Pape, author of Four Swans
Montana Poet Laureate, emeritus

These poems explore the boundaries and infinite potential of the mundane world. The same bodily reflexes that betray vanity, lust, and shame become the gateways to the spirit and the connective tissue that binds us to others, and even to ourselves. Wyatt conjures snapshots from memory that prove that we see ourselves best through the mirrors others provide us; and that we learn by seeing and continually re-seeing those images. We are reminded that our identities are dynamic, never static, and that revisitation can be an act of intimacy, forgiveness, and deep friendship to the self. This beautiful work invites us into the mysteries and paradoxes of our humanity with humor, candor and deep vision.

~ Ashley McWaters, author of Whitework

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