Impspired Title

FRIENDS ONCE THERE

by ANN KAMMERER

In Friends Once There, Ann Kammerer pays homage to high school friends who passed away, many before reaching the age of 25. Each of the 15 narrative poems in this collection examines the challenges that shaped the lives of people coming of age in the 1970s, and the effects those forces sometimes had on opportunities and choices. Told in a concise, journalistic style, these poems evoke the universal theme of youthful idealism gone astray. “Ann Kammerer’s narrative poetry speeds up the lives of her narrator’s former friends to reveal their traumatic trajectories in the time since they parted, often ending in tragedy. From the first stanza of each poem, Kammerer reveals a world in which the young are set up to fail by the adults in their lives. Lacking firm foundations, these friends struggle to build lives worthy of escape. Kammerer’s ability to review, mine, and collate past relationships, and turn them into concise and coherent biography, is second to none. In Friends Once There, she digs deep to answer the one question we all have about friends with whom we’ve lost touch: ‘I wonder what happened to them?’” – Jordan Trethewey, City of Fredericton Poet Laureate, author of These Are the People in Your Neighbourhood (Roadside Press)