Next Time You Come Home

by Lisa Dordal

In Next Time You Come Home , Lisa Dordal distills one hundred eighty letters she received from her mother over a twelve-year period (1989-2001) into short, meditative entries that reflect upon motherhood, marriage, grief, the beauty of the natural world, same-sex relationships, and the passage of time, as well as on issues such as racism, sexism, and climate change. The entries--which are something between letters and poems--portray a mother who, despite her alcoholism, maintains an engaged and compassionate presence in the world, one nourished by intellectual curiosity, life-long relationships with family and friends, and active involvement in a religious community.

"A newly recovered trove of letters is the source material for Next Time You Come Home, but the collection's true genius lies in the communion of mother and daughter across time. In distilling her late mother's letters to their loving essence, Lisa Dordal focuses not on the "nighttime mother" who drank until her speech was slurred but on the vibrant, nurturing "daytime mother" who taught her how to love the world. This is a radical compassion that heals, offering understanding without excuses or justifications, love without benchmarks or conditions. From its haunting title onward, Next Time You Come Home is an utter original."--Margaret Renkl, author of Late A Natural History of Love and Loss

"In the tradition of the epistle, this wonderful collection of letters turned into poems transports readers back in time. Inside we find reports from Lisa Dordal's mother on the gorgeously mundane moments of shopping at Sears, trying out new shoes, planning dinner. These blessings of the everyday sit beside larger more worldly events all the while marvelously punctuated by the comings and goings of various birds and the cold and warm days of the seasons. Chickadees and sandhill cranes appear within the same lines of letters announcing a loved one's death. And such is life, isn't it? These small, brilliant moments? How fortunate to be able to bear witness to the daily joys and sorrows that could otherwise be long forgotten. These transformative poems leave me even more in awe of each of our precious, fleeting, singular lives."--Didi Jackson, author of Moon Jar

"In Next Time You Come Home , Lisa Dordal exquisitely sculpts her rediscovered letters from her mother into what she describes as 'something between letters and poems--not fully letters and not fully poems, but, instead, their own thing.' The result is a book that captures the ways excision, distillation, rewriting and reshaping play crucial roles in how we might remember and make sense of the lives that shape our own. The quotidian details that Dordal leaves on the page--requests for soup recipes, reports of bird sightings, seasonal shifts--accrue new poignancy as Next Time You Come Home moves with a sneaky momentum through months, then years, then decades. What remains on the page feels like a new and ghostly dialogue between the writer, her mother, and the reader, too--a conversation that is both courageous and illuminating."--Lee Conell, author of The Party Upstairs Poetry.

Genres: Poetry, Memoir, Nonfiction

120 pages, Paperback

Published September 22, 2023

About the author

Lisa Dordal is a Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University and is the author of Mosaic of the Dark, which was a finalist for the 2019 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry; Water Lessons, which was listed by Lambda Literary as one of their most anticipated books for 2022; and Next Time You Come Home, which was listed by Lambda Literary as one of their most anticipated books for 2023. Lisa is a Pushcart Prize and Best-of-the-Net nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Robert Watson Poetry Prize, and the Betty Gabehart Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in The Sun, Narrative, Image, Christian Century, Best New Poets, New Ohio Review, Greensboro Review, RHINO, and CALYX. Her website is lisadordal.com.

Reviews

[Stuart · Rating 3 out of 5]

(copy received via goodreads giveaway)

I appreciate receiving this, along with the author's other two collections, via a giveaway. And I appreciate Dordal's experimentation with form here; each poem is a letter she received from her mother, which she has edited into a poem in order to highlight their relationship's evolution and her mother's life and character.

That said, I don't think the experiment landed with me as well as her fully invented works of her previous collections. This is not the first published work in which Dordal is working through her grief over her mother's death, as well as processing her mother's addiction. By doing so here through her prolific mother's own works, what she is seeking fades behind the everyday occurrences her mother chronicles. The formal shaping of the letters into poems does not, for me, draw further insight. It remains a mother, flawed like all of us, writing to her daughter, through ups and downs, banal and exciting, just staying in touch. The consistency of that alone is something to appreciate, but the works derived from the correspondence largely don't strike a deeper chord for me.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

When they say less is more, sometimes it really is. Dwindling down nearly 200 letters written to her by her mother, Lisa Dordal exquisitely portrayed the love her mother clearly felt for her and for life. With sometimes as little as 6 lines of a letter, she was able to portray the deep care her mother felt.

As someone who understands the struggles that daughters of alcoholic moms face, I found this deeply healing and important.

Using no words of her owns to clarify the significance or explain when the letters might have been written, it came with such clarity in one moment that while the "daytime" (non-drinking) mom and "nighttime" (drinking) mom were one of the same, the love daytime mom felt completely existed at all times.

Sometimes we get so focused on negative things that we miss out on the positive and the beauty. I am thankful to have won this book from Goodreads Giveaways, and I'll take this on as a challenge to see the beauty and love, not just within myself and my mother, but in everyday life before its too late.

[Kathryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sweet, gentle, personal book, somewhere between poetry and memoir, which portrays the loving yet challenging relationship between a mother and her adult daughter in the 1990s and early 2000s. The emphasis though is on love, and the suggestive lacunae that result from the daughter’s poetic editing of her mother’s letters are intriguing. I could relate especially due to sharing demographics with the family (white, German-American, politically liberal, middle class, educated). Some of the questions and comments, like ones about a piano concert, the public radio station, baseball, or The New Yorker felt incredibly familiar!

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poems that uses phrases/sentences culled from letters the poet's mother wrote to her.

from October 1989: "Last week—with the Earthquake—was difficult. / Those few days—Tues, Weds, Thurs—seemed an eternity. / Everyone was asking about you."

from October 1991: "Last Thursday, one of my favorite secretaries dropped dead. / She'd had lunch with other staff and had felt fine—then collapsed / while talking to a student. It has brought Sheila's death very close again."

from March 1996: "I would be delighted if, someday, you had a special friend, / and we could meet her."

[Nina Pacent · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Next Time You Come Home” is the perfect example of how time and perspective come together to weave love in its purest form. Its simplicity says so much about the complexity of our relationships and why the saying “Less is More” couldn’t be any truer. It fills me with memories of my own mother, who, because of this book, I’m able to see in a new light. I cherish that opportunity.

[Nina]

Hyde Park! Epistles! Mother-daughter adult relationships! Love and poignancy in the mundane. After this review, how could I not? Boom, ordered.

[Katrinka]

I easily got sucked in here, and can't explain why—maybe it's simply the draw involved in the distillation of a particularly situated life, via one carefully shaped as-told-to archive. (Plus, I'm a sucker for all things epistolary.)

[John Butler · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 2021 Lisa Dordal came across 180 letters from her late mother spanning from 1989 to 2001. These she 'sculpted' into a serene and engaging series of short poems reflecting the lives of Lisa, her mother, and sometimes newsworthy events of the day.