John Scarffe, Nederland. Local writer, Alexander Joseph has just published a new poetry book based around his family history and his great-grandfather called Buttons and Bones published by the renowned Above Ground Press out of Ottawa, Canada.

This book is a chapbook which is a series of sonnets connected by the last line of the first poem, which becomes the first line of the next poem. The final poem is the last line of each of the other poems. “I wanted to use this form because It reminds me of DNA and the pass down of inheritance,” says Joseph.

Alexander Joseph was born at the Boulder Community Hospital and raised in Rollinsville. He attended Nederland schools for his pre-college education, and went to a traveling college in which he spent each semester in a different country. This included going to Panama, Nicaragua, Turkey, India, China and Australia. When he was living in New York in 2016, he started writing poetry. He worked in Manhattan and lived in Brooklyn and would write during the hour commute. “I was inspired by all that was around me, all that I saw and heard and smelt and felt, there was a vibration there I wanted to capture on the page.”

After the big city, he missed the mountains and the people that live here and moved back to the area to work in construction and eventually get a master’s degree at Naropa University in Boulder. He recently finished his master’s degree in creative writing and has started working toward a degree in education.

“My dream is to teach writing at Nederland High School, to help to bring up another generation of mountain folks and to teach them how to tell of our wonderful home through writing” he says. He teaches creative writing at the college level and does construction and other odd jobs to supplement his income. 

Alexander has been writing for The Mountain-Ear for about a year now. He first sent poems during the pandemic as he was renovating a 1934 cabin with his girlfriend, where and with whom he now lives. He loves this community and hopes to continue to be part of it for a long while. 

Here is one of the fifteen sonnets from Buttons and Bones

that same song sung from auschwitz to charlottesville

what am I without a people a land a knowhow a home

but an angry white boy in sweat damp sheets

dreaming of yellow ribbon tangled in curly hair

waking with ruined fruit on my new world tongue

what am I without the rain or blue sky

other than scared of what’s above or reflected

hiding in sawmilled pine or history of the camps

covering myself with the names and color they gave us

what I am but flat footed and complicit

a conqueror clinging to a conquered past

no necklace or history to show my pride 

no native language to detail the dirt

no bread to break nowhere to go back to

but in my dreams I walk with grandfather to town

If you’re interested in a copy of this chapbook which is for sale for $5 (the proceeds of which go to the cost of the printing), send Alexander an email at alexanderjosephpoetry@gmail.com or order from abovegroundpress.blogspot.com.

(Originally published in the April 8, 2021, edition of The Mountain-Ear.)