Way Elsewhere
by Julie Trimingham
When the heart breaks, hit the road. An unnamed narrator ricochets from the edge of a volcano to the site of a crashed UFO, from sugarcane fields to glaciers, from coal mines to bee hives, from friendship to chance encounters. She’s looking for equilibrium, home, the past, adventure; she’s looking for something she can’t quite pin down. Julie Trimingham's Way Elsewhere is a fictional, experimental travelogue that defies genre as ardently as it embraces a perilous, wondrous world.
"At the center of Way Elsewhere is a singular, brooding consciousness, a specific “I” that remains consistent from poem to poem. This “I” may be only one aspect of Trimingham herself or a fictionalized version of such, but it holds from poem to poem, a palpable identity, one that admits to her own suffering and her own embarrassments, one that resonates with the pain of a crucially broken heart."
- John Vanderslice in Heavy Feather Review
Buy Way Elsewhere
2016 | 52 pp | 978-0-9911863-5-8
Excerpt
Do you even know what it’s like to wake up in the morning and there is warm skin beside you and touching ankles and even her hair smells good and now I’ll never see her again except sometimes? They moved to a whole other country.
Sometimes I wish my heart would spasm again, that I’d love with such fury.
The world is ending, she yells, into the wind, at me.
It always is, I have to tell her.
An iceberg passes.