Release Date: October 14, 2025
Size: 6x9
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-57869-209-5
eBook ISBN: tbd
Library of Congress Control Number: tbd
Booksellers and Libraries: Order Info Here or at Ingram.

SYNOPSIS

Time Capsule is a debut poetry chapbook about love lost and love kept, the challenges of aging, worries over climate change, dogs, broken friendships, and art and literature—in essence, poems as varied as life. Personal experiences are used for a range of styles and stories. One poem recalls dancing in various forms and with various partners. Death is addressed in a poem in which the speaker plays cards with its agent. There is a serious sonnet and a lighthearted sonnet; a ghazal and a villanelle; and free-range forms that all capture this poet’s authentic, funny, and thoughtful voice.

Praise

“Alongside its wisdom and joys, Nancy Gordon’s Time Capsule seeks to contain the pain and losses that come with a long life: ‘So many dances / trace their steps in my memory.’ Whether speaking as Icarus or the Last Duchess, God or Eve, in sonnet or villanelle, on the ski slopes or dance floor or golf course, Gordon swings us from pathos (‘As the oceans rise, / my eyes are also filling’) to wry humor (‘If music be the food of love, I’m hungry’). In poems that combine the ‘bright intelligence’ Gordon reads in a rescue dog’s eyes with the ‘cordial rhythm’ she seeks in a lover, it’s clear that ‘her life and loves’ have not ‘finished blazing.’” 

—Rebecca Starks, author of Time Is Always Now

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“I have admired Nancy Gordon’s clear-eyed and wise writing for years now. Her first collection, Time Capsule, is nothing less than a cause for celebration—each poem proof of a writer coming into her own, mining personal history and relationships for insights that appear so rarely in American poetry these days. Examining both love and mortality, these joyful poems ‘celebrate our motley tunes,’ and honor a life well-lived with wide-open eyes and heart.”

—James Crews, author of Unlocking the Heart and Turning Toward Grief

Meet the Author

Nancy Gordon was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1938, and grew up in Chestertown and AuSable Forks, New York. She graduated from Wellesley College, earned a Master of Arts in Teaching from Wesleyan University, and taught high-school English for years, including a year teaching in New Zealand on a Fulbright-Hayes exchange grant. Her marriage in her mid thirties took her to Miami, Florida, where she earned a law degree from the University of Miami School of Law in 1982, and then practiced law until 2012. In the years since her retirement she has been writing poems and enjoying poetry workshops.