TESTIMONIALS
Praise for Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s Poetry
" oh my! This book of beautiful strong poems is the very best book I've read in many years. The poems are breathtaking and reading them for me is both a deeply moving and instructive experience. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley's amazing world and her amazingly powerful womanhood, her love of her native Liberia, her family, her U.S. life, and o here as poet and teacher, and her passion for life itself all come through in these pages. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Pat Fargnoli"
Patricia Fargnoli,
/ NH Poet Laureate"Ms. Wesley writes about more than her homeland. Her verses about the connections between men and women have a poignancy that even the inevitable disconnection can not equal. A song/poem for Barak Obama on his election made my heart dance. I loved seeing New Orleans, my father's home, through non-native eyes. The vagaries of aging are too familiar, as are the inevitabilities of change, and learning to let go of things, places, and people. I grew up in a Liberia much earlier than the events written about in these books, even though the memories are ones i can relate to. The familiarity of her words brings tears to my eyes of joy and sorrow. I am thankful for the skill and passion of Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, and grateful beyond measure that she seeks to gather the bones of her people, and help heal her Motherland."
Ann Bellinger Hammon
/ Reader" Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, unlike many other bi-coastal writers, has discovered, finally, a voice that blends the Liberian repetition and musicality to the Midwestern (and now, Northeast) flat hills and flattened accents. Her stories are troubling--wars that are personal and contentious; issues of raising children in a space not her own, yet completely her own; finding new ways to negotiate the spaces she finds herself paddling in; a now adult daughter, emboldened by her college-freedom; coming to terms with the loss of her mother. These are the troubled waters of content in Jabbeh Wesley's new collection, but there is language here and tone that are adept at saying precisely what lies at the river's shallow edges and deep ends. Jabbeh Wesley has stories to tell & languages & music & precision to tell them."
Audre Charles
/ Reader" Where the Road Turns makes it unnecessary for Patricia Jabbeh Wesley to keep telling us that she is a voice that will be heard. The poems in this book cry out in rage and shout, nearly demand to be read out loud. Her beautiful rolling cadence causes the poems to read themselves aloud as they make us part of Liberian turmoil that robbed her of family and friends and of the inevitable passing of time. There is nothing fragile about the power of these poems, and they dramatically show that there is much that passing of time cannot heal. Wesley is a lioness in her anger, and she is so able to control that anger that it does not slide into bitterness. Her willingness to be vulnerable is powerful in itself. "Waiting" seems the perfect explanation of cultural difference related to how time is experienced as it points out the American obsession with being fractured into seconds. "The Blessing" that Wesley has chosen to close the book is the perfect benediction. Steeped in realism, it does bless without any of the romanticism that could come with such a title. I found so much life and joy in this book though it is steeped in death and grief as well."