About the Poems - TN
About the Poems
by T.A. Noonan "Par Avion" was originally conceived as a series of postcards to my fiancé. I never sent them; instead, I just copied them in my travel notebooks over and over. When I returned from France and read them, I realized how intimate they were. I'd been working on Petticoat Government, a collection of poems and essays exploring female identity and the body, and the issues I was grappling with had come to a head in those postcards. Most striking, though, was the fact that I wasn't addressing some imaginary reader—I was addressing a real person, someone I loved and trusted. These poems were for flight. No wonder I was scared to mail them.