About The Core Spins Faster Than the Surface:
In these poems, Jamey Temple grapples with a series of difficult circumstances that arrive one after another, unmooring her life. In the span of four years, she experiences pregnancy loss, the death of a loved one to Covid, a house fire from a lightning strike, a thousand-year flood at a writing workshop, and her husband’s cycling accident.
What to do but take each day as it comes, she learns. Her notebook, a way to process what happens, moves her forward even when events threaten to still her.
Kitchens, hospital rooms, rural roads, and damaged landscapes become places of reckoning, where care and attention are acts of endurance. Though on the surface there is disruption, beneath it spin questions, doubt, anger, fear, and love. These poems refine the difficult, uncovering what is true and necessary to live.