In her debut collection and the first book in the Crossroads Poetry Series, Renee K. Nicholson brings you a profound lyric exploration of the everyday.  Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center unfolds like a ballet's grand adagio, moving across the physical, spiritual, and emotional places that make an American life. From the Carolina low-country boils to the sweet mountains of Appalachia to the grand heights of New York City, this collection, in parts playful and parts profound, traces the turns and chassés that a life in its freewheeling manner can cast.

Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center (Crossroads Poetry)

Literature & Fiction

Nicholson, Renée K.

Poetry

Urban Farmhouse Press

Memoir about ballet and illness from a creative writing teacher whose career as a ballerina was stopped by rheumatoid arthritis. Renée Nicholson's professional training in ballet had both moments of magnificence and moments of torment, from fittings of elaborate platter tutus to strange language barriers and unrealistic expectations of the body. In Fierce and Delicate, she looks back on the often confused and driven self she had been shaped into--always away from home, with friends who were also rivals, influenced by teachers in ways sometimes productive and at other times bordering on sadistic--and finds beauty in the small roles she performed. When, inevitably, Nicholson moved on from dancing, severed from her first love by illness, she discovered that she retained the lyricism and narrative of ballet itself as she negotiated life with rheumatoid arthritis. An intentionally fractured memoir-in-essays, Fierce and Delicate navigates the traditional geographies of South Florida, northern Michigan, New York City, Milwaukee, West Virginia, and also geographies of the body--long, supple limbs; knee replacements; remembered bodies and actual. It is a book about the world of professional dance and also about living with chronic disease, about being shattered yet realizing the power to assemble oneself again, in a new way.

Fierce and Delicate: Essays on Dance and Illness

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

West Virginia University Press

Postscripts makes many travels, from the landscapes and cultures of foreign travels, to the long journey through grief. Thrown also into relief is home-for this poet, West Virginia, in the heart of Appalachia-and all the ways it balances the hard-hewn beauty and hardscrabble realities. Like a travel diary or a love letter home, these poems speak to place in all its incarnations: physical, artistic, spiritual, familial, and imagined.

Postscripts

Wild Ink Publishing LLC

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Books by Nicholson, Renée K.