How To: life lessons in poetry, by Grace Dellis

Poetry, chapbook, 40 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Stacked haiku, prose poetry, and free verse poetry come together in Grace Dellis’s second chapbook, How To: Life Lessons in Poetry. A peek into the daily navigations of life, How To moves from serious to silly, offering a selection of poems that are biting, thoughtful, clever, and deeply human. Where her first chapbook recollected a particular moment in time, How To gives us a broader look into the way poets see the world – with fierce curiosity, sharp humor, and profound kindness.

With poems about poetry, personhood, faith, friendship, anger, grief, and more, How To invites us to explore the age-old question: how do we live a meaningful life? The answers range from anger (How to Burn Bridges) to unraveling (Notes on the Human Condition) to sarcastic (How to Survive Capitalism), and everything in between. Grace’s poems remind us that life is often hard, requiring care and attention, but it is also a thing to be enjoyed; the playfulness she incorporates into much of her work, even when writing about the difficulty of staying safe as a woman, or about the emotions that arise when signing divorce papers, or the challenge of walking away from a long-held faith, creates a reading experience that feels acutely personal.

George Eliot wrote, “What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?” In How To, Grace explores the countless ways we share the weight of life. As we learn from each other, tapping into the unique perspectives that are born from shared experiences, difficulty subsides. How To: Life Lessons in Poetry is, in this way, one poet’s offering to her readers – that in life’s most arduous moment, we can find someone else who has felt the same thing.

Grace Dellis is a poet and single mother living in Huntsville, AL. She serves on the Board of Out Loud Huntsville, a thriving community of spoken word artists in Alabama. Her work has appeared in various journals, anthologies, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize; How To: Life Lessons in Poetry is her second chapbook. You can connect with her on Instagram, @gracedellis.