In this first collection by Midwest writer BD Feil, Lifting Myself By My Own Toes, the poems pull from experiences and observations across the Great Lakes, from the cities of Chicago and Cleveland to the rurality of southeast Michigan and of northwest Ohio. Through memory and trial, familial legend and Nature, Feil examines the comfort of place and the discomfort of misplacement.
In the first group of poems, "well-meaning strokes," BD Feil muses on the vitality of words and graspings at meaning. In "A Reading" he bemoans at jumping to a taste, a heavy burden akin to lifting "himself by his own toes."
The next group of poems, "savages and monsters," alternates between standing inside and outside Nature, not only in the idealized worlds of "Heaven" and "Night" but in the longer poems of "Monster" and "In Which Mrs. Adams Observes And Passes Judgment On The Cottonwood And The Goldfinch" where observation spins into running narrative.
In the poems of "red-knuckled apples," Feil likens himself to fruit "left hanging to the end" andf digs into memory, of his own and of his family. In "Visiting" he remembers eavesdropping on stories peopled with "names like Florence and Rhiney and two Edwins."
Finally, the last section, "now is the time for the sighing," deals with the quest for place, either in the larger universe or in the intimacy of the mirror as in "Boy and a Button" where a child lays out his likes and dislikes all the while "his little fingers weaving/ exquisite patterns against/ a bright blue sky no one/ but him has ever noticed."
Poems in this collection by BD Feil have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes as well as appearing in journals like Poet Lore, Slice Magazine, The Penn Review, New Plains Review, Margie, and Plainsongs.
