Joanne Esser reflects on the impermanence of life
Something happens when you read a poetry collection while watching soft rainfall outside the kitchen window, raindrops making tiny splashes in the birdbath. The birds have taken cover somewhere. So have the squirrels, especially the one who likes to dig up the zinnias. The young rabbit who finds the rose bush — with all its thorns! — delicious is missing. And you find yourself slipping into reflection.
If the poetry collection is one like Nothing Is Stationary, the new publication by Joanne Esser, your reflections are not only sharpened; they also take you down paths you didn’t expect to go. Esser is realizing that most of her life is behind her, and she’s thinking about where she came from and where she is.
She’s thinking about dust, which we all return to. She’s thinking about the people she has allowed (or who sometimes inserted themselves) into her poetry and her life. She’s thinking about what she experiences when she looks at a sonogram of her granddaughter in utero. She finds a self-portrait in a female cardinal at a bird feeder. She considers where she comes from, and how she was shaped by the natural landscape. She wonders what restless angels do when they’re not busy, and what kinds of mischief they can get up to.
Ghosts inhabit these poems, like ghosts inhabit our lives. Family members who have passed. Old loves. The old man now locked in a care home. Conversations we thought were so important at the time. The parents who reared us but are now gone. All the things in our lives we thought were supposed to happen. The grief that smells like old potatoes.
Esser writes carefully and succinctly. She doesn’t waste a single word. The poems are straightforward. Sometimes she expresses a thought. Sometimes she tells a story. Sometimes she points out the two stories of everyone’s life.
Two Stories
There are two true stories
of everyone’s life.
There’s the one you are told
when the person you once loved
slams the door,
pulls out of the driveway
for the last time
and you hear: it’s all
your fault. It’s always
your fault. If you
were a better person,
this would not have happened.
It echoes in your head
like truth, like a priest
or a parent or teacher
has seen the stains
in your soul and
how ugly they are.
You hear it again
as you’re rushing to work,
at the grocery store,
at your child’s day care center,
the only story you have time
to listen to.
And then, months later,
or maybe years,
or maybe after you’ve lived long enough,
the other one:
the one the river whispers
as it flows over rock
smoothing, smoothing,
as it carries winged maple seeds
that have fallen in,
and newly hatched tadpoles
just flexing their tails.
The story of the world in motion.
How nothing is stationary
and all the edges change shape
over time.
To my hands the water offers the story
of rounded stones.
Joanne Esser
Esser previously published All We Can Do Is Name Them: Poems; Humming at the Dinner Table: Poems; and I Have Always Wanted Lightning: Poems. Her poetry has been published in such literary journals as Echolation, I-70 Review, Great Lakes Review, Dunes Review, and Orca, among many others. She received an MFA degree from Hamline University and has taught young children for more than 40 years. She lives in Minnesota.
So, fair warning. Nothing Is Stationary is a beautiful collection. It will make you reflect upon your own life. You’ll remember things that you cherish, and you’ll be reminded of things that still hurt. But, perhaps most of all, you’ll be reminded of the impermanence of life, including your own. Strangely, you’ll feel gratitude.
Photo by Maja Dumat, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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- Poets and Poems: Joanne Esser and “Nothing Is Stationary” - June 2, 2026
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