Keeping Room

Keeping Room is an intimate collection grounded in familial spaces of home and garden. The poems grapple with the nature of survival, and the survival of nature. The collection spools from the pain of chronic illness and grief, to the loss of political freedoms, to the disrupted urban (and global) landscape. However, despite despair and uncertainty, the poems reach for hope, love, and strength in the unlikely places where they may be found, with a steady turn toward nature and healing, and, often, healing through nature.

Ann Wallace’s embodied, ecopoetic collection Keeping Room explores the spaces we keep and are kept, and what we must make room for. The narrator goes from a “girl searching alone and in silence for toads,” to a college student experiencing a cancer diagnosis during “nature’s near-neon boast,” to a mother navigating long COVID alongside her daughter. In a bittersweet twist, her daughter being unwell slows, for a time, “the steady march // away from childhood,” and the “ever cycling // further from the song and skip.” A series of nightmare poems is braided with the waking nightmare of pandemic and with verses on cooking, where outcomes are measured into existence, and imperfections smoothed with utensils, imagination, and grit. Wallace’s book closes as generously as it was composed, with “an ear bent toward hope.”
Rebecca Hart Olander, author of Singing from the Deep End

"I was left breathless time and again by the wisdom and breadth of the hard-won, deftly crafted poetry in Ann Wallace's Keeping Room. By turns harrowing and heartening, her poems of illness and recovery urge us toward nature and our own human nature of resilience and renewal. Keeping Room invites us all to open a little more than is comfortable to the pull of this difficult world, holding space for the paradox that "disruption and love equal joy."- James Crews, author of Turning Toward Grief and Breathing Room

You might not suspect a book that begins with cancer, covid, hypoxia, nuclear medicine, and the ER to be hopeful. But after a long and hard narrative through health issues, nightmares, and gun violence, we find ourselves in the Pine Barrens after a hurricane, or ruminating over untended gardens. Wallace leaves us not with loss but with “a bending toward hope,” and days of reclamation. There are mourning doves and wild clover, salamanders and a “spit of woodland”—as if the mere presence of the natural world may heal. “There is sweetness here in this year of pain and solitude,” an attentive to the small things of the world. These are poems written out of hard struggle. But in the end, through her music and her art, Wallace leads us home, with heart, hope, and healing, to witness chefs making breakfast and bakers baking—to live, to eat.
Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of Death Prefers the Minor Keys