"Everything here welcomes us
except these hard stones at our feet
and the red, red sun, firing down between clouds."
​ -- from "Finding Fox Red, 2014"

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​ Praise for Blue Star: 

“These are poems of witness, dire and poignant, that chant long after you close the book, poems that exult the working class – an ethnography of farmers, blacksmiths, and mill workers tithed to the earth for all time, and bound to defend it even unto death, ‘their steps weary with unfinished war.’ Barbara Presnell is the heir and daughter of their sacred anthems. Blue Star is utterly essential.”
 
Joseph Bathanti, author of The 13th Sunday after Pentecost and Light at the Seam
 
“In this treasure tracing war, race, and the Quaker faith through her family history, Presnell's heart belongs to her son, to whom the book is dedicated and who she prays "will never see a battlefield." Some of the book’s most moving poems evoke tender-tough challenges to the mother-son bond, which finds resilience through ‘small miracles of transformation’ as her son becomes a man making a family of his own."

Heather H. Thomas, author of Resurrection Papers and Blue Ruby
 
“This is first and foremost a testament to the ties that bind mothers and sons, fathers and daughters across time and space. No reader will finish this book and be untouched, nor unchanged through its reading." 
​
John P. Beck, co-director of Our Daily Work/Our Daily Lives, Michigan State University

Blue Star is a story of war and its effect on family. The poems weave history, census and military records, letters, journals, and other documents to tell the 100-year story of a one Southern family.  The title, refers to the stars family members hang from banners in their windows when a son or daughter is in service (now noted in our Blue Star Memorial highways and elsewhere). Interspersed with poems of war are accounts of a mother and her son as he grows from a  child into a young man starting a family of his own. 

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Poems from Blue Star

What Flutters 
​
             Heat rising. Tick of afternoon sun.
The screen door, banging. A telegram.
When it comes, Hannah is in the kitchen making dinner.
She slips her greased finger beneath the flap,
hands trembling so she can hardly read. 
            Company almost wiped out. Stop. Our boys
            fought bravely to the end. Stop.
It’s the almost she clings to as day splinters
into days, then a week.
 
            Wings tipping. Grass that pillows.
Loose fabric.  A place called France—she’s seen it on a map
and Slim sent a postcard back in July. 
Words. Picture of a cow in a field like theirs.
Bone jur scribbled above the cow's ear.
Seems like a fine place on the back side. And,
            Everybody says hi. I sure miss
            your cold ice tea, Mama.
 
            Flotilla of red leaves. Fine hairs
of a sweet potato. Screen door
banging.  Her husband Josiah holds the letter. 
He's alive. Our boy. Then names those gone: 
            the Dixon's youngest,  Jimmy Gatlin,
            Big John Pugh. More.
His gray chin on her shoulder.
Dusk stirring in.

"What Flutters" was first published in Innisfree Poetry Journal 19, 2015

Company K: From Asheboro to the Fields of France premiered at the Sunset theatre on Sept. 18, 2018. 

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"Josiah, 13" was first published in Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, 2015

​Josiah, 13  
                   Little River, 1874

Picture him, hair cast in sun
and thick as hay, a tall boy, paused
by his horse at the edge of a field to gaze
 
out toward the woods and beyond.
August heat scorches down on late summer corn,
tasseled and plumping for harvest.
 
He doesn’t know much beyond this acreage,
can’t imagine himself next year,
let alone one day with a girl by his side,
 
and children as measured as kernels on a cob.
All he knows is the trouble he’ll find
if he isn’t home soon but he doesn’t
 
think about that. He doesn’t think at all,
but feels—his bare chest, hips tucked
into loose britches, too tight boots
 
passed down from his brothers, brown skin
prickling, cheek flush and warm against
the sweaty neck of his bay. 

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