CARBONDALE — Local poet and SIU professor Allison Joseph recently released a collection of poems Dwelling, which she said is “about home and how we find home, how home is in other people.”
Among the people in which Joseph depicts home in Dwelling are her mother, her late husband and herself.
“My mother is a figure… Mother — that’s our original home, right? So she’s a figure that kind of haunts the book a little bit,” she said.
Joseph and her late husband Jon Tribble were hired to teach creative writing at SIU in 1994, and together they helped found the literary magazine Crab Orchard Review, a journal that publishes emerging and established writers from around the world.
“It’s also got poems about being a woman and how beautiful, glorious and dangerous that can be,” she said. “It ends pretty much with me talking to my 12 year old self, which is an assignment I give to my students — write a letter to yourself at a pivotal age.”