Praise for Nobody Calls Me Darling Anymore

Dannye Romine Powell’s marvelous new collection gives us a generous offering of poems that document the tender mercies of a woman ruminating on the cusp of endtime. Shockingly insightful, the poems look away from no aspect of a woman’s life, fully entering (and suffering) both the joys and the agonies entailed by our deep commitments to others. In plain style language and a lucid, epigrammatic form, Powell’s poems arrest us again and again with their brutal intelligence and emotional authenticity.  

—Kate Daniels, author of A Walk in Victoria’s Secret

In these delicately observed poems, Dannye Romine Powell shines a light on the moments that become the markers of our lives. This is intimate poetry, finely and, at its best, feverishly rendered.

—Enid Shomer, author of The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

In her poem “The Bears Come Home,” Dannye Romine Powell re-imagines the fairy tale of Goldilocks with the girl’s whole family involved this time, and not to good results. The poem is a snapshot of Powell’s strong new book Nobody Calls Me Darling Anymore, only what she’s telling aren’t fairy tales: they are family tales in all their honest heartbreak and hope. The love and longing in these poems is as visceral as a childhood parakeet nibbling at your ear. The days of being called Darling may be past, but these poems remember them and sometimes that’s more than enough. 

—Michael Chitwood, author of Living Wages

About the Author

DANNYE ROMINE POWELL is the author of three previous collections, two of which have won the Brockman-Campbell Award for the best book of poetry published by a North Carolinian in the prior year. She’s won fellowships in poetry from the NEA and the North Carolina Arts Council and has won a residency to the writer’s colony Yaddo, where she slept one icy winter in the bedroom once occupied by Sylvia Plath. She has worked for many years at the Charlotte Observer, where she is once again writing about books and authors. She is also the author of a non-fiction book, Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband Lew Powell, also a long-time journalist.