On reading Rachel Fenton´s Beerstorming with Charlotte Brontë in New York

“A moment in the past´s revealing.” is the last line of this hand-finished chapbook – Lordy would I have loved to hold this book in my hands, inspect the stitches! – and sets the scene for a meandering in New York. New York. Just the titles of the poems, serious work, serious play in the New York Public Library, The Berg Collection where 

“Tonight, we will share ideas, beers
bought with a bottle opener from a drug store 
on a corner where streets 
whose names and numbers
I struggle to remember.” 

And on to Fifth Avenue, Sesame Street , Brooklyn Bridge. And then  Revisiting to Berg where

“photographs remind me
I can go back       re-read 
but never unknow“

And finally the Research Findings and that last line I mentioned at the outset now preceded by a clause of completion: 

“…what’s to come, 
a moment in the past’s revealing.“

And here is the link to the publisher of this creative work

This is a chapbook that triggered a more personal response as I sank into the poems and New York, New York.

Rachel J Fenton is a working-class writer from Yorkshire. She lives in Aotearoa where she is also known as Rae Joyce and received a Creative New Zealand Arts Grant to research, write and draw a graphic biography of Charlotte Brontë’s best friend Mary Taylor, from which the poems in this chapbook sprang. She would tell you how much she has written but she has dyscalculia. She has some children and works in an op-shop.