Nancy Owen Nelson Knihy

In Portals: A Memoir in Verse, we enter Nelson’s liminal dreamscape into poems populated by Beckett, Godot, Hemingway, even Johnny Cash, who have passed through an aperture filled with light and longing, transfixed in time and space. Portals is a collection filled with moving elegies and profound meditations on the seminal moments when one is transported to another plane via myriad conduits. Nelson’s astute introspection transfigures even the minute moments in life, making this a collection worth savoring and returning to again and again. Kelly Fordon, author of Goodbye Toothless House, a poetry collection, and Garden for the Blind, a novel-in-stories.

How does a progressive woman with southern roots confront the racial tension that exists in our country today? In these poems, Nancy Owen Nelson grapples with how to embrace her ancestry while resisting, as Rev. Dr. Stephen Butler Murray states, “the social sins that drench the soil of that beloved ground” on which her ancestors are buried. The poems move from the violence of the 2017 Charlottesville incident though Nelson’s family history, focusing on women who loved and sustained their families and men who, farmers, fought for the Confederacy, narrative accounts of former slaves, and finally, to the 20th century Civil Rights Movement. Author Judith Hillman Paterson calls My Heart Wears No Colors “a cycle of poems portraying four generations [including the author] trying to come to terms with their roots in a sometimes violent, often racist, Deep South.”