The Core Spins Faster Than the Surface, by Jamey Temple

Poetry, chapbook, 40 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

In these poems, Jamey Temple grapples with a series of difficult circumstances that arrive one after another, unmooring her life. In the span of four years, she experiences pregnancy loss, the death of a loved one to Covid, a house fire from a lightning strike, a thousand-year flood at a writing workshop, and her husband’s cycling accident.

What to do but take each day as it comes, she learns. Her notebook, a way to process what happens, moves her forward even when events threaten to still her.

Kitchens, hospital rooms, rural roads, and damaged landscapes become places of reckoning, where care and attention are acts of endurance. Though on the surface there is disruption, beneath it spin questions, doubt, anger, fear, and love. These poems refine the difficult, uncovering what is true and necessary to live.

Jamey Temple is a writer and professor who teaches English at University of the Cumberlands in Eastern Kentucky. Her poetry and prose have been included in several publications such as Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Rattle, Appalachian Review, and Bending Genres. She has been named finalist for Newfound Journal’s Prose Prize, Fourth Genre’s Multimedia Essay Prize, and Wavelength’s Chapbook Contest and nominated for Best Microfiction, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. She is the recipient of an Artist Enrichment grant from Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Excellence in Teaching award from University of the Cumberlands. You can read more of her published work through her website (jameytemple.com).