Conversations With Thoreau

Alice D’Alessio

Like her chapbook’s namesake, D’Alessio focuses her poetic attentions on nature and communion with the environment. Her celebration is also a lament for the lost world of Thoreau and the “star-crossed” space she finds between them. It is a brief cosmic moment, but no less isolating for the author:  “Too bad we missed each other – / passing like aberrant comets / in a blip of eternity; I needed / your assurance…”

Alice D’Alessio is a Middleton, Wisconsin, poet with a degree in English literature from Allegheny College in Pennsylvania and additional post-graduate course work at the Iowa Writers School, Split Rock,( U. of Minnesota), and the UW-Madison. She was Director of Communications for Marshall Erdman and Associates, Madison for 11 years, and Editor to the Dean of Letters and Science at UW-Madison from 1996-2000. She has attended classes at The Clearing in Ellison Bay, and teaches for Elderhostel at Green Lake.

D’Alessio is the author of Uncommon Sense: the Life of Marshall Erdman (with Doug Moe, Trails Press, 2003). Her poems have appeared in a variety of publications, including the Wisconsin Academy Journal, Fox Cry, North Coast Review , The Kerf, and Earth’s Daughters.  She was winner of the Posner Prize in 2004 from the Council for Wisconsin Writers for her first book of poetry, A Blessing of Trees (Cross+Roads Press) and her second book , Days We Are Given, won first prize and publication from Earth’s Daughters. She is currently contributing editor for Midwest Woodlands and Prairies magazine , and serves on the board of the Council for Wisconsin Writers.

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Excerpt

Walden Pond Restoration

When you wrote, I love my fate
to the very core and rind, we believed you
and we wanted a bite of that same melon.
Why did we have to consume it, seeds and all,
rip up the vines and poison the garden?