Paula Anne Yup grew up in the southwest in a family of modest means. The poem “Waiting” got triggered after a conversation with her sister. She has no recollection of the incident, but she remembers longing for a Raggedy Ann doll which she never got and longing for a trip to the Grand Canyon which she eventually got as an adult.
Her mother-in-law insists she lives in the past while her husband is equally insistent that she has a shallow memory. She does have flashbacks caused by bad events in a difficult childhood. Also, learning problems have her struggling with her daily life. She is grateful for her college education and loves to read, to draw and to knit.
Sometimes she feels bitter about her life circumstances, but she can’t deny that life is an adventure full of surprises.
Making a Clean Space in the Sky by Paula Yup
Cover: Design by Dean Jacobson
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Paula Yup is a poet of vision and reflection whose verse is accessible and quietly profound. The poems in Making a Clean Space in the Sky cast a collective spell and illuminate life, love, and loss. — Wally Lamb, author of The Hour I First Believed
These are quotidian poems out of an exotic locale to most of us, Majuro, The Republic of the Marshall Islands. Though “as easy as prose,” as Robert Lowell said of his last collection of poems, like his they arrest, linger in memory as Paula Yup writes a “waterfall of words / which I must drink.” — Parker Towle, author of Weather Is No Womb
In Making a Clean Space in the Sky, Paula Yup immerses her readers powerfully in a personal past scarred by abuse and self doubt. But through these revelations of pain also come a forgiveness and a tenderness, an embracing of the self and the other. Sometimes using an innovative syntax, sometimes just telling it like it is, but with a subtlety, craft and control that captivates you, she reveals many levels of awareness at once. — Rustin Larson, author of Crazy Star and The Wine-Dark House
Paula Yup’s poetry is full of vivid scenes and strong emotion, tempered with a unique sense of humor that softens the hurt of being human. Even though she now feels the exile of Pacific island life, her past years in diverse cultures—Phoenix, Tokyo, Woods Hole, Spokane—make her sharp eyes focus clearly. — Elinor Benedict, author of All That Divides Us and Late News from the Wilderness
Read poem: Childhood 8 from Evening Street Review, NUMBER 2, SPRING 2010
Read poem: In Maui I Figure it Out 90 Evening Street Review, NUMBER 7, Autumn 2012
Read poems: At Fifty-five 137 Overdosing 138 Riwut Corner 140 Evening Street Review, NUMBER 8, SPRING 2013
Read poems: What I Miss in Majuro? 51 Majuro Clinic 51 Mysteries are All I Can Read 52 Ars Poetica 53 Evening Street Review, NUMBER 19, Autumn 2018
Read poems: As an American Girl 57 Sixty-one 59 My Secret 59 When I was a Nanny 60 from Evening Street Review, NUMBER 23, Spring 2020
Read poems: Milk Bottle 152 Cinco de Mayo 153 from Evening Street Review, NUMBER 24, Summer 2020
Read Poems: My Friend’s Book 27 Once upon a Time 27 from Evening Street Review, NUMBER 28, Spring 2021
Read poems: “My Father’s Knife” 18 Doing Nothing 19 from Evening Street Review, NUMBER 29
Read poems: “Soren the Seven-year-old” 64 and “At the Airport” 64 from Evening Street Review, NUMBER 34
Read poem: “From his Garden” 55 Evening Street Review, Number 35
Read poem I Don’t Know 26 Evening Street Review Number 38
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