Permanent Change of Station by Lisa Stice

Permanent Change of Station Reviews

• 
  Susanne Aspley

  I wrote a review of this book on my blog so thought I'd post it here also :)
  
  It starts with the cover.
  A sweet little girl, lost in thought alongside her faithful ‘Wizard of Oz’ terrier, evokes ‘there’s no place like home”. This beautiful scene is above a harsh photo of a humvee in an angry and dangerous desert a world away. This juxtaposition between what we want and what we have is the crux of the human condition.
  We want serenity but instead battle disruption.
  Permanent Change of Station, the newest book of poetry by Lisa Stice, provides the voice of what we want versus what we have.
  My favorite is this one sentence poem:
  Fix, Mommy
  Some things never go
  back to the way they were.
  I read this as - Fix Mommy. As a mom, I often feel broken. This poem made me remember when my daughter used to ask me to fix something, and I easily could. She’s a difficult teen now, and it breaks me when I can’t fix her problems anymore. I wish we could go back to the way things were, when all it took was a kiss and maybe an ice cream cone to make her troubles melt away. It’s not like that anymore.
  
  In View from My Kitchen Window, Stice admires, (maybe a little jealously) a showy red cardinal outside her kitchen. She wishes she could move her family as easily as a bird…lifting her family from one place to another, and be ‘lightweight’ with no ‘baggage or belongings’.
  
  I also liked the poem, Fifth Choice. Do we get what we deserve? Would I want what I deserve? Sometimes I deserve a pie in the face. Sometimes I deserve scorn. Sometimes I deserve love. What do we really deserve?
  
  In, The Dog Dreams, the poet comforts a sleeping dog. I’ve watched my dog sleeping, then twitch, and make weak running motions. I wonder what is going on in my dog’s head. Same as mine? Stice then reassures us, and her dog, to come home and stay, because the sun is shining here.
  ​​
  There is a sometimes funny disconnect between men and women, and the poem, Another Disappointment exploits it. Did the woman want the foxglove flower, but he brought home the brand of motor cross gloves instead? Or perhaps she wanted luxurious leather gloves trimmed with fox fur, but he gave her a planter of foxgloves?
  Who knows.
  ​​
  That’s the wonderful thing about this collection of poetry. The reader can take the poems to explore the feelings they have in their own lives. And hopefully, that will lead us all to a little more serenity.
  
  Permanent Change of Station is available via Amazon and other booksellers worldwide as well as her first poetry collection, Uniform.
  Published by Middle West Press, LLC, an up and coming micro press based in Iowa, with these titles worth checking out:
  Hugging this Rock by Eric Chandler
  FOB Haiku by Randy Brown
  Reporting For Duty by Randy Brown
• 
  D.A. Gray

  Should be read more than once. Stice's poems address the identities that remain true through each changing duty station and the many struggles that aren't covered in the media, even though the family's battle is in many ways more essential than a new weapon. This is true war poetry -- finding the story of the one that refuses to fit the prescribed narrative.
• 
  Kersten Christianson

  Creative Energy from the Homefront: A Review of Permanent Change of Station
  
  Lisa Stice’s newest release Permanent Change of Station (Middle West Press LLC, 2018) casts light upon the speaker’s challenges of keeping home(s) while nurturing a young daughter along with a Norwich Terrier companion through various deployments. These charges are set to the institutionalized pace of a military lifestyle.
  
  First, I am struck by the contrasting cover images. Against a turquoise bluebird sky is Mary Stevenson Cassatt’s oil-on-canvas, Little Girl in Blue Armchair. Here is the little girl planning out her next step, tiny dog in tow, catching twenty winks, juxtaposed with a photograph below of a sharp-edged Humvee traversing blank-slated, endless desert (photo credit: Sgt. Conner Robbins). The pairing of the two speaks of frozen motion.
  
  But the true energy is that of Stice’s writing. Organized into three sections (Half-Known Roads, The In-Betweens and Bedtime Stories), she writes not of particular places, but of growth, namely that between a mother and child as they reconcile the comings and goings of a husband and father, and maneuver the uncomfortable terrain of establishing yet another new home in yet another new town.
  
  boxes of melted crayons
  melted a little more
  inside a moving truck
  
  birthday streamers
  still rolled up somewhere
  in a box under a box behind a box
  
  locking a door
  another last time
  with no goodbyes
  
  It’s one thing to have the proverbial junk drawer forever fixed in the kitchen, the drawer that collects the gathered, broken crayons, the end rounds of birthday streamers, the loose rubble. It is another to routinely pack it all up, establish yet another catch-all drawer in a far-flung place to be determined by the military establishment.
  
  It is a life not without objection.
  
  While inviting the reader into this world, Stice ultimately challenges the reader’s own views, especially with her meager-line poems. In “Fifth Choice,” she writes,
  
  I’d be
  lying
  
  if I
  told you
  
  we get
  what we
  deserve.
  
  I can’t tell you how many times I turned back to this page, this neck punch of a poem, to consider again its ramifications, its purpose, its placement. The poem immediately following, “When In Difficult Country,” offers resignation:
  
  we do not know
  the mountains
  
  and valleys ahead
  we never will
  
  they are earth and stones
  just the same
  
  I enjoy much the spontaneity of several poems: “Afternoon One Day When You Were Young,” “Daughter,” and “On Such Little Things Happiness Depends,” among others. Contained within are the unplanned moments that catch even the speaker by surprise. That Sun Tzu and Dr. Seuss are referenced in epigraphs illustrates the dimensionality of Stice’s work.
  
  As with the dueling cover images, Stice writes with the vernacular of a mother and pairs it with the jargon of the military. This, too, is the beauty of her earlier work, Uniform (Aldrich Press, 2016). This use of hinged language provides fresh and prodigious reading. Like the Humvee in the cover’s photograph, Stice’s poetry is a also vessel; not one symbolic of war-time, but instead, a creative force.
  
  Stice, Lisa. Permanent Change of Station. Middle West Press, LLC, 2018.
  
• 
  Eric Chandler

  Read about the joyful love of a mother for her daughter and dog. There’s a price. You’ll also experience what it’s like to be related to Uncle Sam by marriage: gut-wrenching worry, isolation, and disruption. Stice channels Sun Tzu’s Art of War into the title of one of her poems and reminds us: We Can Only Be Saved by Destruction.
  
• 
  Andria Williams

  These poems are moving, tender, with dashes of thoughtful humor. You will feel connected to the author and her daughter as you read. A marvelous collection for anyone who's endured separations from loved ones, who feels out of place in a new locale, or who's struggling to find a true home. Lisa Stice is observant and incredibly talented, and I'll read anything she writes.