Persephone’s Alibi Poems by Nina Bannett

Persephone’s Alibi by Nina Bannett is a sharply etched collection of sketches of a friendship’s arc.

Sample Poems by Nina Bannett

“Nina Bannett’s exquisite poems are stunning and startling in their emotional range and linguistic precision. The 24 poems in Persephone’s Alibi examine the life, death, and afterlife of a tenderly, brutally complex female friendship in which the poet-narrator is by turns baffled, enraged, open and on guard, wistful, grief-stricken, resistant and resigned. We are taken through the friends’ shared girlhoods, actual moves and emotional transitions, cultural divides, and respective marriages. Persephone’s Alibi is a sad and sardonic anatomy of a long friendship in which ‘new meaning’ emerges from an emotional underworld and the friend-poet muses in a heart-sore  apostrophe, ‘there was no need to lose you.’”—Kate Falvey, poet, author of The Language of Little Girls

“‘We never really know who we are seeing, whose bones we are fingering through the water.’ These skillfully crafted lines end ‘Last Gasps,’ a poem which navigates the ambiguous loss one feels as the hugeness of moving through life overtakes us, causing the relationships we once held as sacred to evolve—sometimes beyond our own understanding. Nina Bannett’s latest collection, Persephone’s Alibi, is filled with deeply evocative poetic moments like these. Each line of poetry has been created with striking precision and is then wonderfully articulated upon the page. More than that, her writing is deliberately filled with layered meaning, allowing her reader to revisit each piece again and again, only to find something new and lovely among the lines. Persephone’s Alibi is, without question, some of the author’s finest work. Lovers of her previous collections will remain fans, while those experiencing her writing for the first time are likely to join the ranks.”—Monique Ferrell, author of bone 

Nina Bannett is the author of Motion Photos (2024), These Acts of Water (2015) and Lithium Witness(2011). Her poetry has been featured in numerous journals including North American Review, Valley Voices, Bellevue Literary Review and WomenArts Quarterly. She is Professor of English at New York City College of Technology, City University of New York. www.ninabannett.com