Nancy Owen Nelson

How does a progressive woman with southern roots confront the racial tension that exists in our country today? In these poems, Nancy Owen Nelson grapples with how to embrace her ancestry while resisting, as Rev. Dr. Stephen Butler Murray states, “the social sins that drench the soil of that beloved ground” on which her ancestors are buried. The poems move from the violence of the 2017 Charlottesville incident though Nelson’s family history, focusing on women who loved and sustained their families and men who, farmers, fought for the Confederacy, narrative accounts of former slaves, and finally, to the 20th century Civil Rights Movement.

In "Portals: A Memoir in Verse," we enter Nelson’s liminal dreamscape into poems populated by Beckett, Godot, Hemingway, even Johnny Cash, who have passed through an aperture filled with light and longing, transfixed in time and space. Portals is a collection filled with moving elegies and profound meditations on the seminal moments when one is transported to another plane via myriad conduits. Nelson’s astute introspection transfigures even the minute moments in life, making this a collection worth savoring and returning to again and again.
Kelly Fordon, author of Goodbye Toothless House, a poetry collection, and Garden for the Blind, a novel-in-stories.

Can be purchased from: https://kelsaybooks.com/products/portals?_pos=1&_sid=b4333cf32&_ss=r

Nancy Owen Nelson's engrossing memoir is about her search for her mysterious grandmother, Nannie B., who died while giving birth to the author's mother in 1905. She was subsequently erased from the family memory, her death a too painful memory for Nancy's grandfather, successful Alabama businessman Robert Chandler. However, that erasure had a significant impact not only on the author's mother, but also on the author. Nancy Owen Nelson’s search resulted in raising more questions about herself, even as it answered questions about her mysterious grandmother. Nonetheless, in the end her journey toward discovery was one of startling self-awareness and connection.