“Pangaea :: Home” by Heather Lang
The Poet
Heather Lang’s poetry has been published by or is forthcoming within Pleiades, december, Mead, Jelly Bucket, The Normal School online, and others. She serves as the Online Managing Editor for The Literary Review, as Co-Editor for Petite Hound Press, and as an adjunct professor. Recently, Heather earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her chapbook manuscript was named a semifinalist in the 2014 Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook competition, her poetry has been twice nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and she was awarded the Murphy Writing of Stockton University Scholarship for their Spain 2015 program.
The Poem
Our idea of “home” is often built around another person. It’s their presence that invests a house with meaning. What happens, though, when that person is self-destructive? Announces they’ve fallen off the wagon by leaving their 4-, 5-, 10-years-sober medallions in all the most popular bars around town? The speaker can be forgiven for wanting to walk away from all the drama, but in so doing she stumbles on a difficult truth: Making an emotional break is much more difficult than making a physical one. Pangea may have broken up long ago, but the resulting continents all still feel each other shift and slip.
The Design
How to represent by visual means the deep twinge that comes from realizing something solid, something you’ve counted on for support, can move? To do this the typefaces had to feel rooted. The serifs on both Rockwell and Courier are so pronounced they make lines of text look like horizontal support beams. Using Courier’s oblique gives the body just enough movement to suggest the tug felt at the surface from a deep plate boundary earthquake.