Both Sides from the Middle

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1970S, NORTHERN UTAH, A STEP ACROSS THE BORDER. Beginning with the poem, "Education of an Idaho Farm Girl," this volume tells what happened to the girl who left. Section I finds the newly divorced narrator sitting at a desk in "the adult education classroom," pondering the results of a too-young marriage. Mid-point in this section, poems that unfolded through years of loss and abuse begin to take a turn, to open into humor and an "attitude seven layers deep."In the middle three sections, the narrator's education continues when she gives up living happily alone for a partner she can't imagine living without. She learns to reconcile their past lives and individual dreams with all that depends on them as a couple, not just their blended and extended human family, but also the future of a precarious environment within which they all reside. By Section V, the people, places and things they've acquired as a couple gain even more significance when they are suddenly given a terminal time limit in which to share them. The results of a midlife cancer diagnosis remind the narrator that nothing in this world has only two sides, two paths, two ways of thinking. But to reach that realization can take decades of "seeing both sides from the middle."