Tiller North

Poetry. TILLER NORTH takes us behind the walls of a fishing village in coastal Maine. With her insider's voice, Rosa Lane breaks the code of silence in her telling: secrets embedded within class, sexual identity, familial relationships, death, and rebirth. I once said I would not look back, Lane tells us toward the end of TILLER NORTH, but how grateful we are that she has, opening a world for us where she learned to listen not just for the cry of the loon, but also the rhythms of boats in water, bamboo flutes, the rusty jaw of the mailbox, June bugs that bomb / the porch light with spiny legs, and all the sounds that accompany Maine's harsh winters and lush summers. But we don't just hear this world: Lane makes us see it, with one stunning image after another. From the ghost of a horse in a collapsed barn to her father who stitches the backyard when he returns from death as a hummingbird, the poems are so richly observed that by the end, all we want is to look back, again and again.