The Sound of Her Good Name BY Candace Curran

With its fierce momentum, The Sound of Her Good Name compels the reader through truth telling and piercing perceptions of human behavior. Curran’s open-eyed, heart-felt poems handle the most difficult of material with a tender power.

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Close Call

How we find each other in a good dinner
down back streets with the music of Fruit Bats
and drive&listen a choreography of liquored
romancing and kitchendancing until enough
is enough of this happyhorseshit and you turn
the switch     the we never know when we’ll wake
dreamscape     the place where snap and dinner’s over
in the streets of Saigon     Paris on motorbikes
the symphony of full bodied reds     Cowboy Junkies
and kitchen dances when I am sent home because
you’ve had enough of this    each in the other’s
arms    where you could lose yourself if not careful

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Written in a wholly original voice, Curran navigates the treacherous domestic landscape of abuse. Her language mirrors the often-fractured thoughts of a girl/woman as well as the chilling voice of an abuser. Even amid the lurking violence, Curran creates music.... Interspersed with short poems of “a daughter caught in doorways” are block-like door poems in which one line breaks out of the pattern....This powerful collection includes a list of resources for people experiencing domestic violence.
—Gail Thomas, author of Leaving Paradise and Trail of Roots

Candace Curran’s poems are unlike anyone else’s. As we enjoy their verbal wit, their bright exciting pinball machine dynamics, their badass musicality, we are escorted, in The Sound of Her Good Name, through a story of betrayal, atrocity, and trauma. These poems are more than a testament to resilience, they are its demonstration. —Richard Hoffman, author of People Once Real

Candace Curran tells it slant and you can ride that angle like a birdwing slicing down, deflecting its swoop so each poem offers its story, its pain, almost noir bleakness and wry asides in such a way the assault shifts into lyric. Curran’s language is wonderfully individual, tender even at its most wrenching. Insistence and humor also inform occasional manipulations of typeface....The Sound of her Good Name is both shielded and vulnerable; its darkness sparkles. Attention and intention blend to a power of voice, an odd colloquial elegance....I truly love this book; its disturbances nourish. —Jody Stewart , author of This Momentary World

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Candace R. Curran lives in Buckland, Massachusetts, and was raised alongside Wachusett Mountain in rural Princeton by a Coyote and Ford mechanic doing the best they could. Curran is the founder and organizer of INTERFACE, exhibitions that included the work of twenty or more artists and poets over ten years of presentations throughout Western Massachusetts. Candace was also a co-founder of Exploded View, a five-woman traveling collaborative art and poetry performance group. Her publications include the anthology, Bone Cages, with Doug Anderson and John Hodgen and others (Haley’s Press, 1996); and her book Playing in Wrecks (Haley’s Press, 2011). Candace’s poetry has also appeared in the journals Meat For Tea, Silkworm, RAW NerVZ Haiku, and others.