A
bout Linda Scheller
Linda Scheller is a California Central Valley educator and the author of Fierce Light, Wind & Children, and Laurels. Her poetry, book reviews, and plays appear in Colorado Review, Poetry East, Notre Dame Review, and elsewhere. She is the letters chair for National League of American Pen Women’s Modesto branch and serves as vice president of Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center.
Praise for The Ghosts of 16 Larkin Street
Linda Scheller’s The Ghosts of 16 Larkin Street is a vivid reminder that home can be a fortifying cradle and inspiriting first window or a veritable ground zero, the scene of the crime (“home is a wound that will not heal”). A wizard at revelatory domestic portraiture and telltale family incidents, Scheller reconstructs home and examines, with artfulness and agility, her German American heritage—not out of mere allegiance and nostalgia but in an intrepid quest for compassion, clarity, and authentic identity. As able exorcist, gallant gumshoe, and family-focused singer, Scheller conveys a fearless and poignant sense of resilience and hard-won candor passed on as shareable wisdom.—Cyrus Cassells, 2021 Texas Poet Laureate, author of Lorca to the Umpteenth Power
This powerful memoir-in-verse charts the generational haunting of this brave poet’s lineage. From a family tragedy to secrets, depression, and recovery, Linda Scheller has done the difficult work of engaging her ghosts. About her mother, Scheller writes, “Before hanging up, I force myself to chirp/love you, short for I wish I could love you.” This is how memory liberates. This is an honest, sobering, revelatory book.—Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate, author of In Praise of Late Wonder: New and Selected Poems
Compelling, accessible, and remarkably honest, The Ghosts of 16 Larkin Street is filled with stark, realistic, personal yet quite universal poems that paint an intimate portrait of identity, interpersonal struggles, loss, family, and the ever-present need for empathy. In these vibrant poems of community, nature, biography, Scheller showcases a true talent for imbuing the smallest human details with authenticity and layered meanings. Each poem maps out the human heart in relation to that larger human heart we all share together, in all their internal conflicts, with precision and grace.—John Sibley Williams, author of As One Fire Consumers Another
