French Door to Foyer by Signe Damron and illustrated by Cassidy Rae Marietta is my first poetry/prose collection of 2023, and it is so fitting that it was written by a friend of mine! Signe and I coached Special Olympics swimming together while I was in college, and I was honored to receive a digital copy of her book.
French Door to Foyer is sectioned into three parts: Observational, Internal Dialogue, and Imaginative Adventure. I felt like the poems in each of these sections fit very well together, but my favorite part was Internal Dialogue. I tend to talk to myself as I'm understanding the world around me, and this section had two of my favorite poems from the collection, "Be" and "Grief." I felt that these two poems resonated strongly with me, and I felt like I was able to not only understand the emotions of the speaker, but I was also able to feel them.
While I am not typically a big poetry or prose reader, I found this collection to be really insightful in processing grief and healing. The speaker(s) dive into what it means to observe but also feel the deep, difficult emotions and sit with them, and I enjoyed it.
I think the title is really fitting for this collection. I was thinking about how we observe the world around us and all of its intricacies, kind of like a French door, and then as we go through it and go through the world, we move into this liminal space of figuring out our own place in the world. I liked how the Imaginative Adventure didn't force a definitive ending, as good poetry shouldn't, so it allows the reader to imagine more beyond the scope of the collection and venture into the metaphorical foyer.
The illustrations in this book are similar to the cover and are the heading pages for each section of the collection. I thought that these illustrations were simple yet delicate, and I think it would look extremely pleasing on a coffee table as a physical book that you can revisit at any time.
French Door to Foyer is available now from Signe-ture Publishing through larger retailers like Amazon or from local bookstores in Columbus, Ohio (Bookspace and Gramercy Books). I can't wait to see what's next!
Do you like to read poetry or prose? What are your favorite poetry collections? I'd love to hear from you!
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