Poet Jolene Brink asked the Tuesday Group audience three questions: “What place holds your story? What story do you keep going back to? What story do you want your children to be able to tell about that place?”
Brink recently published her first collection of poems titled Overburden: Poetry, Landscape, and History. The first half of the collection is inspired by Brink’s personal family history from Norway, and the second half is reflections on motherhood during the Covid-19 pandemic. Brink began the presentation by providing a different method for analyzing poetry: “For those whose only experience with poetry was overanalyzing a Robert Frost poem in the last year of high school, and ever since then, when you hear poetry, you think, ugghh, I don’t think I understand how it works, I’m here to tell you it doesn’t have to be that. Consider poetry as curiosity, as something that is archival, as something that doesn’t need our interpretation, but it does seek our attention.”
Brink’s 10th great grandfather’s discovery of copper in his home town of Røros, Norway led to the idea for a poetry collection. Brink travelled to Røros to research her family’s legacy of mining and digging. Overburden is actually the term used to describe the layer of topsoil and rocks covering a mineral deposit, which must be removed to access the resources underneath.
“As one of my aunts said to me at one point…what do you hope to get out of all this digging? But I just couldn’t stop thinking about all these connections and wanting to find a way to tell that story,” says Brink.
Although not a native of Ely, Brink grew up working for her family’s gravel pit, and has lived in many places across the U.S. that employ mining as their main source of income. “I’m not a miner, I’m not a scientist, I’m not a biologist, I’m just curious,” said Brink.
The second half of the book centers around Brink’s experience as a mother.
“In 2020, I became a mother during the pandemic… my son was born at 32 weeks, and we spent the first seven weeks of the pandemic in the NICU,” said Brink. “Then I had this little tiny baby, at a time when everyone was so scared, and everything was so tight, and the radius of everything pulled in.”
The poems she selected to read aloud summoned many a tear from audience members.
“I have hundreds of poetry books in my office, and I rarely read them straight through…in an entire book of poetry I might find one or two poems that really make me stand up straight…my hope is that there’s maybe one of those in this for you,” said Brink.
Overburden is available for purchase online or at Piragis bookstore. Brink is planning another poetry reading from her book in August in the Twin Cities at Magers and Quinn bookstore. Feel free to contact Brink through her website https://www.jolenebrink. com/.
