Lynn Fanok, Bucks County writer and runner-up for the 2025 Bucks County Poet Laureate contest, read from her newly-released sophomore poetry book, “The Weeds,” a collection on childhood, grief, and the natural world.
Fanok, host of a monthly poetry series in the Newtown Bookshop, for the first time in her career read to the students of Bucks County Community College on Oct. 25 at 12:30 p.m. at the Newtown Campus’s Tyler Hall. Fanok arrived early to the event, before the arrival of the approximately 40 guests, and was able to speak on her writing and preparation for the event itself.
To Fanok, the book is in large part about, “the things that haunted me, a little girl – a childhood friend— and her sad end.” This person had died in her adulthood before she and Fanok could reconnect. She continues, “I wanted to give a voice to that person who haunted me. Same with her family, I write a poem about her brother. With the names changed of course.”
On choosing what material to read for the event, Fanok explained, “It was tough, I’d love to read them all. It was a problem – I didn’t know what to choose.” A fleeting read on the page, a large part of the beauty “The Weeds” offers in its arrangement. The poems are organized in such an order that gently unravels insight into Fanok’s life in proximity to nature and entropy; it is a shame that the audience only experienced a sliver of this gem of contemplative pacing.
Throughout the book and the reading, Fanok continually references this girl by the alias of Wanda from her childhood. Fanok revealed, “This book is in some way dedicated to her life – I want to write about her as I remember her as she was young.” She further explains the book’s conception, “I started with Wanda, weaving Wanda throughout the book and the book around her.”
Fanok ultimately landed on beginning her reading with the poem, “Haunt,” located in the middle of the poetry book and serving as a clarifying text on the natural world surrounding Fanok’s early years. Read aloud, Fanok describes it serving as “an introductory poem. It sets things up for the audience, talks about the unstable landscape.”
In her childhood, Fanok’s family lived in Sayreville, New Jersy – her house just a notable dirt path away from the weedy wetlands– an environment frequented by brushfires Fanok recalls, “happened almost every summer behind our house” and flooding. She describes this thin boundary between natural disaster in her childhood in her earlier poems, “The Dirt Road” and “Borders.”
During 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, Fanok details in her poem titled “It Was As If Rain Had Chose Our Street to Rave On,” Fanok’s childhood neighborhood was completely devastated in the torrential rain, finally claimed by an entropic nature. “What remained?” Fanok read aloud, “The area had returned to its natural state.”
In Fanok’s vision, nature is rendered a sublime force of intrigue, uncaring disaster and reconciliation. Fanok remarked that she had been contemplative of the natural world, “ever since I could remember. Otherwise, I couldn’t have remembered all those scenes I write about from my childhood.”