Our Family Tree and Other Myths

“Jean LeBlanc warns us at the beginning of Our Family Tree and Other Myths, her second collection of poetry for Shanti Arts, not to assume these explorations along the ‘ever-shifting borderlands between memory and imagination’ are autobiographical. Instead, she asks us to relate the clues in these exquisite poems to our own families, and to wonder ‘how did she know’ . . . our feeling that we certainly don’t belong in the family we ended up in. (Don’t worry, LeBlanc reassures, ‘You understand it might not have been a bad thing, being switched at birth.’) . . . ’losing’ a mother when ‘she finds the unlocked door to the side parking lot’ and flees the building, ‘Like any one of us, looking for home.’ LeBlanc gives us permission to go into our memories, to relive and even reimagine the past, present, and future. ‘And if I am imagining it, sings old Bibeau, so what? Isn’t imagining seeing too?’ Or feeling. Or dreaming. The past LeBlanc gives us through the characters and stories in this collection is neither sunny nor dark, it is the sepia-toned dusk we glimpse just over our shoulder as we step inside and prepare for bed, where the line between memory, imagination, and dream is blurred just enough for us to travel with her, safely, allowed to ‘receive what’s left behind, and call it new.’” -D. Scott Humphries, author of Finding Pahaquarra; associate editor of The Stillwater Review

Jean LeBlanc grew up in Massachusetts, midway between Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson. After moving to northwestern New Jersey in 1994, she taught college writing and literature for twenty-five years. Her poetry appears in numerous journals and collections, including Terrible Terrain: Poems Inspired by the Life of Lavinia Dickinson (Shanti Arts, 2023). A vibrant local poetry community keeps her inspired, especially the Writers’ Roundtable of Sussex County, New Jersey, and the Betty June Silconas Poetry Center, of which she is a past director. She also explores the transformative power of imagery using collage, asemic writing, and other visual media.

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