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Fall 2018 Release 
CAUGHT BETWEEN COASTS
Collected Poems 1989–2018
Print ISBN: 978-0-9973643-4-7
Trade paper, 148 pp., $14.95POETRY / Women Authors
Living off the grid in small-town middle America, capturing scenes of survival and reckoning, and examining family and personal histories are recurring themes in Jan Chronister's full-length poetry collection CAUGHT BETWEEN COASTS.
The "coasts" map birth and death, brother and sister, child and parent, along the shores of Lake Michigan and Lake Superior where Chronister has lived. Poems address being a daughter, mother, and woman while inviting readers to consider honestly how these roles shape our lives.
Called a "memorable collection" by Peggy Trojan, author of Essence, Homefront: Childhood Memories of WWII and Free Range Kids, and endorsed as "a poetic kaleidoscope," this volume of short poems, spoken in pure language, is “a multicolored story of the poet's life... Warm, honest, often humorous, solid.”
Sheila Packa, Duluth Poet Laureate & author of Night Train Red Dust, says that "Jan Chronister’s narrative poems in Caught between Coasts follow the arc of life, and they are lit by long summer days and glints of lake light in northern Wisconsin and Minnesota... History is told through the many women's stories: 'beds made up / but never slept in / waiting for the lost' and steel hearts. In another poem, she says her 'children walked on ice / ran with scissors / played with fire / spoke to me in silence.' In these stories of women and of family, she makes connections between the everyday, the confounding, and the miraculous."
According to Angela Voras-Hills, finalist for the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, Chronister's collection is "intimate with the environment and sympathetic toward the dead." She notes that "Chronister meditates on loneliness and the transformative powers of nature. This collection offers an honest, unflinching look at how family histories shape us, how our own histories often begin with loss, and asks us to consider what we take from life and how we hope to leave it."
CAUGHT BETWEEN COASTS was recognized by the Wisconsin Library Association for outstanding achievement in poetry.
About the Author
JAN CHRONISTER has been published in state, regional, and national anthologies and has won numerous contests and awards, including the Diane Glancy Award for Poetry from Bemidji State University. Her chapbook Target Practice was published by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Parallel Press in 2009. Her self-published collection of Holocaust poems, Casualties, was issued in 2017. She founded the Thunderbird Review in 2013 while teaching writing at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College in Cloquet, Minnesota.
Now retired, Jan currently serves as president of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and lives in the woods near Maple, Wisconsin, with her husband and a geriatric cat.
More about Jan and her work can be found at
www.janchronisterpoetry.wordpress.com.
Book Release Celebration
Sunday, September 23, 2018
2-4 p.m.
Lake Superior Estuarium on Barker's Island
3 Marina Drive
Superior, WI
The public is invited to help celebrate the release of Caught between Coasts. Jan Chronister will read from her new collection, with musical interludes provided by Sarah Jane Hale and Joe Lindzius, the acoustic duo known as Similar Dogs. They often perform at Superior's Thirsty Pagan.
Light refreshments will be served. Call 218-310-6354 for more information.
