Charting an extraordinary journey through recent history, poet Jeanie Greensfelder uses her lifetime as a lens to explore the staggering speed of change in her latest book, Time Traveler.
Greensfelder’s poems are filled with wonder at the world’s progress from telegrams to cell phones, from radio to TV to internet to AI, from doctors’ home visits to clinics and urgent cares, from no seatbelts to tickets for not wearing one.
“Through the details of daily living, she [Greensfelder] extracts her wisdom,” according to author Margaret Van Every (In a Better Place). “I often smiled to encounter myself in these lines as I realized our journeys are not as unique as we have always imagined.”
The framework of time travel also lets Greensfelder wonder what happened between her 10-year-old self and her current age 80 self. She revisits childhood milestones, from seeing her toes had bones in an X-ray machine at a department store, to the simple hardships of pulling weeds or finding the corner grocer out of bubble gum. Poems also explore the universal (and often humorous) experience of aging.
“Greensfelder gives us a long look back at a life that contains eighty years’ worth of joy, wonder, sadness, regrets, and triumphs, but most of all gratitude,” says author Diane Stevens (Liza’s Star Wish, Liza’s Blue Moon).
Greensfelder is a former San Luis Obispo County poet laureate, and the collection reflects the beauty of California’s Central Coast, which she calls home. Her work has been widely published, from Garrison Keillor’s The Writers’ Almanac to American Life in Poetry.
Time Traveler is available from Volumes of Pleasure in Los Osos and online.
Greensfelder is scheduled to read from her book at 2 p.m. on Saturday, January 24 in the SLO Library Community Room in downtown San Luis Obispo.
Editor’s Note: Read Rebecca Jackoway’s review of Time Traveler here; read Greensfelder’s poem “Time Travel” here.