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Rounding the Road’s Curve
Poems by Ansie Baird
In Rounding the Road’s Curve, Ansie Baird returns to the landscapes of memory, family, and the uncertain passage of time with an unflinching eye and a voice at once tender, witty, and unsparing. These poems recover the vivid particulars of a life: a father fashioning tiny walnut boats for children to launch into the rain-swollen streets, a mother whose extravagant personality fills every room, the complicated histories of sisters, and the small, indelible moments when childhood first encounters the mysteries and failures of the adult world.
Baird understands that memory is never simply a refuge. It can be beautiful, comic, bewildering, and painful, sometimes all at once. Her poems move between the intimate and the unexpected, revealing the fractures beneath family rituals and the strange grace that can emerge from loss. With an extraordinary gift for detail, she brings the past into the present, allowing its characters to speak again, in all their contradictions and humanity.
Yet this is not a book of unrelieved sorrow. Baird finds wit in the absurdities of family life, tenderness in unexpected places, and wisdom in the necessary departures that shape our lives. Her poems remind us that the people we have loved remain with us in fragments, gestures, stories, and voices we can never entirely silence.
Rounding the Road’s Curve is a deeply human collection about what we inherit, what we lose, and what we carry forward as the road bends toward the unknown.
Ansie Baird is a Buffalo-based poet whose work explores the complexities of human experience with intelligence, emotional candor, and a quiet, enduring tenderness. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Southern Review,The Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, Western Humanities Review, and numerous other literary journals. Her first full-length collection, In Advance of All Parting, won the White Pine Press national poetry competition in 2009. Her subsequent collections include The Solace of Islands (BlazeVOX [books], 2016) and Porch Watch (Foundlings Press, 2019).
Baird received her M.A. in English from the University at Buffalo and taught for forty years at Buffalo Seminary, where she also served as poet-in-residence. A former editor of Earth’s Daughters and Audit Magazine, she has long been active in the literary life of Western New York. Through Just Buffalo Literary Center’s Writers in Education program, she brought poetry to students throughout the region. She was also an original member of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words collaborative, exploring the fruitful connections between poetry and visual art.
In Rounding the Road’s Curve, Baird brings a lifetime of observation and reflection to questions of loss, memory, love, and renewal, discovering within life’s uncertainties the possibility of acceptance, connection, and hope.
Book Information:
· Paperback: 94 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-560-1
$18
