Accidents of Being: Poems from a Philadelphia Neighborhood

Mary Rohrer-Dann's new collection of poems explores the world surrounding Philadelphia's Burholme Park, a world intimately personal yet also universally familiar. Spanning generations, a diverse cast of characters belong to this neighborhood but also to this nation, and we recognize in their stories so much of our own collective history. Clearly, Accidents of Being is no accidental triumph, but a bittersweet narrative and often lyrically haunting tour de force.

-Martin Lammon, Fuller E. Callaway endowed Flannery O'Connor Chair in Creative Writing at Georgia College (1997-2018), author of News From Where I Live and The Long Road Home



These heart-felt narratives leap with life. Vibrant on page and stage, they portray stories of immigrants, workers, and philanthropists who inform the poet's childhood landscape. Well researched, the collection introduces the founding family of the estate which became a park and museum given "free to the people of Philadelphia forever," and then follows the intersecting generations of various families. From the Underground Railroad to Black Lives Matter and the Pandemic, the poet chronicles, from various perspectives, Philadelphia and American history. By the book's end, we arrive where we began: in familiar but changed territory. Sledding in Burholme Park, we, too, dare to see "how fast/how far/we can go."

--Marjorie Maddox, author of Begin with a Question and In the Museum of My Daughter's Mind



Returning to her poetic heartland, Northeast Philadelphia, Rohrer-Dann resurrects 150 years of American being. In brilliant idiom, she curates interwoven voices with a scholar's acumen and a home girl's sense of social culture. From a ghostly housekeeper turned heiress to a 60's dad dicing celery, the poet deftly positions these disparate lives, and locate us in a burgeoning, national narrative that includes pivotal assassinations, the Vietnam War, 9/11. Her imagery at times lifts this American Chronicle into stunning, numinous ether. From an arsonist's thrill at the "luscious buzz in sizzle suck of air," to a child beholding a fire as "this gushing waterfall of flame," such witness brings a burning sense of renewal.

--VA Smith, author of Biking Through the Stone Age, 2022, and American Daughters, 2023, Kelsay Books