Leslie Ullman has this to say about Self-Portrait as Homestead:

Video-poems from Self-Portrait as Homestead:

“20 Moor Street 1940”

“On Returning to my Childhood Church after My Father’s Funeral”

“Woman as Verb”

Brad Richard’s review appeared in Résonance, Vol. 6 (2024) 09/26/24.

Here’s a favorite excerpt in which Richard analyzes the opeing poem, “Ode to My Father’s Body”:

[T]he low-note harmonica / of my father’s absence” evokes a sound the speaker associates with her father but which now is a signifier of his absence. For the speaker, that sound is also a place where she is lost, leading her to “unfold the map / of his body” in order to find the way to her father in the past, plying his trade in a milieu where he displayed the easy authority of expertise, “conduct[ing] the chorale . . . of his trade.” The father’s actions and the lovingly catalogued details of the barber shop, emblems of a known but mysterious adult world, convey a child’s perspective without the poem having to declare it. By the end of the sentence, the father is “tidy & distant”: the speaker knows she is looking at the past; her father is, in fact, absent; remembering him does not truly bring him back. He is also, however, “not // dissonant,” which returns us to that “low-note harmonica” and suggests to me, among other things, that both in his barbershop and in the speaker’s memory, he belongs. That being true, having found what she was looking for, the speaker is no longer lost. This is remarkable work, almost analytical in its precision, yet intensely lyrical in its execution, and Theriault makes it all look easy.

Claire Raymond’s review appeared in Mom Egg Review 06/01/24.

I love all of it! Here’s a favorite excerpt: “The poet’s immersion in Maine precedes and includes her life, as the poems reach back through family memory of the Franco-American experience in Maine not only as the poet experiences but also as through her voice deceased relatives speak. It is a book deeply grounded in the oppressed lives of cisgender women, mourning in a dry and subtle key the lost potential of women trapped in rigid traditional gender roles. While the book’s title suggests that the poems are about the “self” paradoxically the book’s project is of deconstructing the idea of self, remaking self as a conglomeration of fragments that cohere – self is made of the speaker’s mother, father, cousins, and mémère; self is made of houses once inhabited, husbands once married. Here, self is uncannily decentralized – for the project of Self-Portrait as Homestead is to reencounter the way that the built spaces that hold us, and the people who create and shape us, are fragile and vanishing and in partaking of these mortal nouns the “self” is never central – even though she (the speaker is gendered she/her/hers) builds the book’s spare architecture in her steady voice.”

Claire ends her review this way: “The book’s deft concision belies the breadth and depth and force of its reach. This is a landmark book for Maine, offering a deeply personal vision of the Franco-American experience here.”

Dave Canarie’s review appeared in The Maine Sunday Telegram 05/05/24.

Among my favorite bits: “Theriault is also editor of “Wait: Poems from the Pandemic,” which combines poetry with artwork, a collection showcasing a translucent approach that is not constrained by the spoken word or by the medium of the art; she is able to delve seamlessly between the two forms. “Self-Portrait as Homestead” is another example of her creative expression –  in this case, navigating place and time through words.”

Dave concludes his review this way: “This compelling collection draws the reader in with beautifully crafted poems that are as vulnerable as they are wise. The second-to-last poem in the collection, “Self-Portrait as Homestead,” sums up the ways Theriault considers homestead as homes, people and experiences, ‘all of it catalogued here … in this edifice/of doors and stories and bones.'”

Laurie Graves’ August 8, 2023 Notes from the Hinterland mentions the Waterville launch of Self-Portrait as Homestead:

A favorite excerpt from Laurie’s blog entry: “It gave me great pleasure to hear Jeri use the word “mémère” (grandmother) in her poetry. And what a thrill that the title of one of her poems comes from a street in Waterville’s South End, where I lived as a baby and visited every week as a child. My home, my geography, my ethnic group. While Jeri Theriault’s poetry ranges far from Waterville—to Iwo Jima and the Middle East—for me, Waterville was the center that rippled outward to other places. Perhaps someone not born and raised in Waterville would have had a different take, but that is what stayed with me no matter how far Jeri roamed in her poetry.”

Here’s Nina MacLaughlin’s Boston Globe’s review, The intimacy of home in Maine-based poet’s new collection: (6/28/23)

“A good house is a used place/ turned over and passed on/ a place of winter noons/ layered like the cemetery/ with strange names.” So writes Maine-based Franco-American poet Jeri Theriault in her latest collection, “Self-Portrait as Homestead” (Deerbrook). These are poems of houses, of the places lived in that live in us, and they draw from Theriault’s upbringing in Waterville, Maine. “Fences tilt toward the river like thirsty horses/ and houses lean/ toward one another shrugging as if to say/ it’s pretty good here. It’s okay.” There’s a resignation here, and a sense, too, of resistance against the reins, of knowing one’s place and wondering, at the same time, what else? What more? Here, the house is the home, the house is the body, and Theriault wrestles with its limits, its time-wornness, its continuation in the attics of memory, in the ocean of memory. She writes of the factories where her ancestors worked, where they “inhaled dirt and weed killer,” and about the “stories exhaled” when breathing was dangerous, “all of them makers/ of their own lives.” There’s a force and delicacy to Theriault’s language, a precision of sound and meaning, as when we read the phrase “moth-soft dusk” and know the exactness of the time; in three words she captures its total sensory experience. As a whole, the book, though rooted in a specific time, place, and culture, speaks to the intimate world of our domestic lives. “I want so much from the past and isn’t a house a harbinger/ of future endings?”

Juliana L’Heureux gives a shout-out to Self-Portrait as Homestead in her column “Franco American News and Culture” hosted by THE BANGOR DAILY NEWS. Read her post here. (July 8, 2023)

Juliana’s favorite poem of the collection is “My Father on Iwo Jima.”