Lucky Break
by Terry Ehret

In Terry Ehret’s Lucky Break, the present is not a moment fixed in time, but a dangerous realm where the poet searches for “something worth worshipping.” Pulled by history and memory into the past, and propelled toward the future by the possibilities of what “might be,” Ehret makes her negotiations with contingency. She insists emphatically that “There is nothing to fear,” but it’s the brave honesty of her poems that make this so. By turns tender and fierce, Lucky Break offers the reader courage in lieu of consolation. Ehret quotes Mallarmé’s dictum: “Each book a tomb in miniature for the soul.” A soul could rest easy in Lucky Break.

—Gary Young, author of No Other Life

TERRY EHRET is one of the founders of Sixteen Rivers Press. Literary awards for her previous collections, Lost Body and Translations from the Human Language, include the National Poetry Series, the Commonwealth Club of California Book Award, and the Nimrod/ Hardman Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize. In 1997, as the writer-on-site at the Oakland Museum of California, she created a poetry audio tour for the Gallery of California Art; and from 2004-2006, she served as Sonoma County Poet Laureate. She has taught writing at San Francisco State and Sonoma State Universities, California College of the Arts, Santa Rosa Junior College, and with the California Poets in the Schools Program.  She currently leads private workshops in Sonoma County, California, where she lives with her family.  Lucky Break is her third book of poems. 

POEMS FROM Lucky Break

Lucky Break

A white marble wheel

has many uses: travel,

for example, or shaping clay;

a simple lathe but, like any tool,

needing balance. Else

the center, which is empty,

cannot hold, lets loose

its own purpose,

fragments flying untethered

from any force centripetal,

explodes its form, stone

wheeling, broken

into clavicle and pelvis,

petal and wing,

like disaster,

like the first creation:

joy and death spilling

from the cracked jar—ah!

the thing it isn’t and

ah! the thing it yet

might be.

What It’s About

               with thanks to Allen Ginsberg

Spring is about standing in the dark under the darker eucalyptus

               and feeling the future like an ache in the throat,

               in the lungs like drowning,

               like waiting in silence for the bombs to fall.

Bombs are about who’s lying and who’s counting, and counting

               is about numbers we agree to. Agreeing

               is about investing your money in the same things.

               Money is about money and also about what you don’t have.

Not having is about pain and pain is about being broken each year,

               being broken by promises by grace by the bursting

                              seed-pods of deceit

               and telling ourselves we will heal or if we cannot

               telling ourselves it’s our place to be stupid and broken.

Our place is about three cars in the driveway

               and streetlights and sidewalks

               and sidewalks are about what’s worth protecting.

Protection is about terror and destruction and inevitable suffering

               and suffering is always

               about birth, about stains and mystery

and mysteries are always about the silence

               the aweful, chilling silence that fills the right now before

               whatever is about to happen happens.

March 18, 2008

ORDER BOOK

Binding: paperback

Press run: 1,000 copies

Price: $15

Page count: 96 pages

ISBN: 978-0-9767642-6-7

publication date:

March 1, 2008

Read about Terry Ehret in the Argus Courier, February 28, 2008.

Read review by Bart Schneider in Metroactive Books, October 22, 2008.

Watch video of reading at Sacramento Poetry Center,

October 20, 2008.

Terry Ehret's personal website is at www.terryehret.com.