Nicole Tallman's third book, FERSACE, is a refreshing, fun, and honest handling of hard topics--death, daughterhood, childhood, mental health, displacement, queerdom, work, aging, and other crucial life challenges. In this Michigan-meets-Miami collection, Tallman adjusts to the changing world around her, seeking solace in conversations with the dead and living (including herself), and in new life experiences. With poems arranged in sections inspired by the four seasons she's lost in her move from Michigan to Miami, Tallman grapples with nostalgia and memory, while learning to embrace her new identity as gringa and her new home that both baffles and entertains. This book is a journey with an ultimate destination that leads to truth, love, and acceptance.
Nicole Tallman is the author of three collections: Something Kindred (The SCE Press, 2022), Poems for the People (The SCE Press, 2023), and FERSACE. A Michigan native, she lives in Miami and serves as the official Poetry Ambassador for Miami-Dade County. Find her on social media @natallman and at nicoletallman
"Part cultural satire, part journal intime, part poetic memoir, Nicole Tallman seamlessly stitches these modes of language to take us on her humorous yet serious journey through those proverbial questions of home we all ask ourselves. Replete with evocative imagery, unique metaphors, and a resolute voice, FERSACE explores the various geographical, psychological, and natural landscapes that intersect and interact to render our sense of place. A must-read for anyone who grapples with what it means to belong, or not belong, somewhere."
— Richard Blanco
"In FERSACE (a term she coins for knockoff VERSACE), Nicole Tallman uses the glitz and glamor of Miami, Paris Hilton, and Barbie dolls for reflection about 'aging naturally' in our culture of consumerism. Through this lens, she can say anything! She uses the natural world to combat our regressive political times--see, especially, 'The Moon is Gay (AKA Say Gay!)'. Engaging with the world as well as the personal, Nicole interviews herself in poems written in collaboration with a Ouija board and in others such as 'What's it like to live in Miami?' and 'What's your Spirit Animal?' Her late mother is a constant in this delightfully female-centric book, with epistolary poems to Sylvia Plath, Lorde, Betty White, and Lana Del Rey. These poems are compelling, funny, and true."
— Denise Duhamel
"Built on deadpan observations tinged with grief and melancholy, the poems in Nicole Tallman's FERSACE train a keen eye on modern day society and tackle everything from the iconography of Barbie, Lorde, and Paris Hilton, urban legends, corporate boardrooms, youth culture, advice via Ouija, and the elusive search for home--brilliantly reduced to the ephemeral waft of a scented candle. Part wink, part takedown, part truth bomb, Tallman's FERSACE is a meditation on artifice--how it permeates the personal, the public, the private, the political, and how despite all it tries to conceal, the truth beneath the surface will reveal itself no matter how expertly it is submerged."
— Caridad Moro-Gronlier
