Packing for This Long Journey

Cartographies of Home

by Priscilla Long

MoonPath Press, 2026

reviewed by Carmen Germain

The multi-layered, ghost-like, and welcoming orange-green-umber cover art, “House of Dreams,” by Michelle Bear drew my eye to Cartographies of Home by Priscilla Long. The painting is a fitting homage to Long’s three-tiered book of memory and meditation in moments that inhabit a life.  The prologue, “What was Given, What was Found,” opens the door to the poems that follow, the world as an “enormous library” that will take the poet away from a received version of how things are and toward what must be lived through experience. As s child, Long was “given a story about America,” but not the complete story.  That’s the arrival in these poems.  Each section of the book takes us through childhood and coming of age, middle adulthood, and the anticipation of travel in the uncharted country of the old.

“Greyhound,” which closes the first set of poems, is a story of waiting to ride on the road from girlhood to the promise of freedom, to light up a first cigarette, the flare of perceived emancipation: “Nothing to do / but all I ever wanted to do, / to be here, on my way–away.”   This is a poem I hold fast because it captures so timelessly what it feels like to be young and at the beginning of discovery.  Some of the poems in this section also make clear what Long is escaping from, farm life (and in this case, family life) that is not YouTube-romanticized.  In “House of Anger,” words such as cracks and dust lead us through to “Mother bakes but never speaks / of anger, for who would speak of air?”  Flares and wrath and lashes draw us to the end of the poem, its harrowing last word, “silence.” 

But the freedom of that Greyhound bus!  I lean into the light, too, as she describes the waiting room, her nonchalant pull of red cellophane and the first “whiff / of sulfur.”  I lean into the light, my first real job in Washington, D.C., one month after high school graduation in a Midwest farm town of 5,000 people.  How I boarded a city bus from the Maryland suburbs, my first bus that wasn’t yellow, and saw a curious wire draped above the windows.  How there was a buzz, and the bus stopped, and the people stepped off, and no more time to waste, I asked the woman sitting next to me, “So how does the driver know when to stop?”  And she gazed at me (you poor lamb to the slaughter), “You pull the cord, Baby.”  

That’s what Long is doing in her coming-of-age poems and in the section that follows, “Old Maps.”  She’s pulling the cord, getting down off the ride of her life where she wants to stop, and takes us there: America of 1963 and America burning and civil rights struggles and Viet Nam.  In two poems that address these horrors, “Draft Resister/1” and “Draft Resister/2” Long shows us a broken mind and the terrible price paid for conviction:         

            The next month your mind 

            has shut.  A chasm opens

            between us.  They cheat you

            of bedsheets you say.  You say it

            for the whole two hours.

But the poems in Cartographies of Home also offer the joy of observation, which has its own reward if we pay attention. Long has said she does much sound work as she writes, and I hear music and surprise associations in the poems.  Consider a derelict former home in “Our Old House” described as “an abandoned bride / in her spoiled ivory dress, a sepia / photo fading fast” or consider this rhythm you could put to a song to in “Somewhere,” how an old banjo brings to the poet’s mind the lyric:

            Ain’t no use to sit and cry

            We’ll be angels by and by.

            Sweet words, I think

            decades later, having a smoke

            on a park bench by a river

            in a city whose name I know.

The last poem in this section, “Cartographies,” circles back to the prologue poem, “I dust my books to map where /  I have been…” and ends “by pages turning to seasons / of gardening, reading by the fire, writing…while hiking that rutted road to old age, its contented, all-consuming work.”

We arrive at this old age in the last section, “Home Ground.”  Long is not coy.  She will not paint a Mar-A-Lago face on her poems about aging.  No puffery or filler, no hair extensions or false eyelashes.  And “When You Need Thelonious” brings Monk’s I-mean-business piano pounding into the story, heart-felt dissonance that brings us together in “the broken world.”  Here the poems acknowledge a reckoning in the long ride from childhood to old age.  The poet asks “What have I wasted?” and in a peaceful moment in a café, “My heart / beats as if it were a heart / beating.”  We hear Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue in “What I Did One Sunday Morning,” which makes me want to shred my weekend list—charge car battery, check propane tank, tighten dripping faucet—and pay attention to what is here before it vanishes. This is what we are given. 

As the poet ponders in “Suitcase,” we need the wisdom to know “I may need to become / someone else and yet gain someone / else.”  And the poems are speaking to us.

Carmen Germain is the author of a chapbook and three poetry collections, the latest being Life Drawing (MoonPath Press, 2022). Also a visual artist, she has paintings and drawings published in various poetry/art journals, including Aji, Caesura, and Oyster River Pages. She has been a visiting artist/scholar at the American Academy in Rome.

Get Cartographies of Home at MoonPath Press

Priscilla Long reading from Cartographies of Home on YouTube

William Kenower 2016 interview of Priscilla Long on YouTube

Escape Into Life editor and poet Kathleen Kirk’s review of Priscilla Long’s earlier book, Holy Magic

Escape Into Life poet and reviewer Bethany Reid on Priscilla Long’s Holy Magic