The Driver, The Journey, The Fall

This is the author's first book of poems. The collection is divided into three natural moods or seasons-we follow our speaker's shifts through grief and despair, awareness and observation, hope and inspiration. Each poem was selected and revised from pieces written between 1991 and 2017. In THE DRIVER, THE JOURNEY, THE FALL, Lisa M. McDougald navigates confession and autobiography, writing about a range of trials: the death of her grandfather, love lost and longed for, a co-worker's suicide, and existential anxieties. The author meditates on her heritage by contemplating DNA; she looks upward, celestial, probing there for answers. Here is an ardent soul fighting to sustain herself in a shifting and often isolating modern world through the decay of the 20th century and the dawning of the 21st. She offers us a swing in the park-sharing moments that threaten to plunge us off a cliff, but imploring us to hang on. And we will.