My Accent Is a Map: Poems About Language and Being Heard
About this ebook
Eleven years after leaving Bell Quay, she comes home to help her mother close an alterations shop and move to a new address. In the inland city, she has learnt to speak clearly to strangers at a transport helpline. Back home, familiar words and street names sound different in her mouth. Her mother remembers old landmarks that no longer appear on the map.
Across 45 connected poems, My Accent Is a Map follows their changing conversations through missed turns, recorded instructions and the ordinary work of moving house. These intimate, quietly humorous poems explore how language carries family memory and what it means to be understood by someone who knows your earlier voice.
About the author
Lyra Voss is the author of My Accent Is a Map, a linked poetry collection attentive to speech, family memory and the changing geography of home. Her poems draw their emotional force from ordinary conversations and practical detail, including bus journeys and the precise words people use when giving directions. This collection follows a daughter and mother learning to understand one another in a town that has changed.