{"id":68858,"date":"2016-01-20T08:42:38","date_gmt":"2016-01-20T14:42:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/?p=68858"},"modified":"2016-01-20T08:43:31","modified_gmt":"2016-01-20T14:43:31","slug":"alumna-publishes-chapbook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/2016\/01\/alumna-publishes-chapbook\/","title":{"rendered":"Alumna publishes chapbook"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Best friends die \u2014 and that is really difficult. Delta State alumna and Cleveland native Emma Alford &#8217;12 explores such a loss on her own terms in a new chapbook, &#8220;Stamped.&#8221; In the book\u2019s poems, she taps into the experience of losing her best friend in a car accident at the age of 20, while they both teetered between adolescence and adulthood.<\/p>\n<p>Alford began writing these poems five years ago in a college poetry workshop class immediately after the death of her friend and completed the collection in 2015. Some of the poems were written in response to actual postcards from her friend, with the book displaying reproductions of the postcards next to their corresponding poems.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI found these postcards from Cassidy, some I had responded to and some I hadn\u2019t,\u201d said Alford. \u201cI had these things I needed to say to her and about her. Finding the postcards pushed me to start writing these poems.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Nearly\u00a0all the poems are constructed as a conversation with her deceased friend, directing each line toward her. They capture the experience of loss, but also the humor and subtleties of a friendship cut short much too early.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou can\u2019t make new, old friends, and I think that\u2019s what\u2019s most crushing about losing them at a young age,\u201d she said. \u201cAny friends I make as an adult won\u2019t have grown up next door \u2014 they\u2019ll never know 14-year-old me. Addressing and exploring that fact through these poems has been very important and therapeutic for me.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Mike Smith, author of &#8220;Byron In Baghdad&#8221;<em>\u00a0<\/em>and &#8220;Multiverse,&#8221;\u00a0said, &#8220;Emma Alford\u2019s first book is a beautiful elegy.\u00a0Expertly rendered through a series of poems that transforms a friend\u2019s postcards into a means of coming to terms with loss, this collection participates in the great tradition of English-language poems that celebrate and mourn best friends lost too soon. This is a deeply moving book and one I will read and reread for years to come.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Stamped,&#8221; from Finishing Line Press, is Alford\u2019s first published work of poetry. The book is available\u00a0online at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.finishinglinepress.com\/\">www.finishinglinepress.com<\/a>. Some of the poems have previously appeared in Delta State University\u2019s literary magazine, Confidante. She hails from the Mississippi Delta, but now lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her overweight, orange tabby. She is an editor and contributor for The East Nashvillian magazine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Best friends die \u2014 and that is really difficult. Delta State alumna and Cleveland native Emma Alford &#8217;12 explores such a loss on her own terms in a new chapbook,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":144,"featured_media":68861,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,418,246],"tags":[1408,1479],"class_list":["post-68858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-alumni","category-community-3","category-students","tag-alumni","tag-author"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/144"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68858"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68867,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68858\/revisions\/68867"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}