South Jersey Sand: A Memoir in Poetry
My First Full Poetry Collection Released by Kelsay Books January, 2026
This book is a story of journeys and paths, of traveling and staying put—of what makes a place your home. It is also about my ancestors, my childhood and growth into adulthood, and my move to Maine at age 50, including all the grief and loss involved in the telling. It is a trip home that teaches me what home was really all about.
It also engages in a few rants about the environmental devastation in southern New Jersey caused by commercial interests that are not sympathetic to wildlife and the wildlife-loving humans who call South Jersey home.
If you’d like an autographed copy of South Jersey Sand, drop me a line at empowermepeople@gmail.com. Figure out how to get $28 to me ( I accept Venmo and Paypal as well as checks). South Jersey Sand retails for $23 plus S&H $5. I will include a copy of my chapbook, Not All Are Weeping, to the first twenty people who ask. (I see no point in poetry malingering in a box under my desk. )
“Dig deeper,” says Jean Feldeisen, and in this book, she does exactly that, excavating the sands around her South Jersey roots to find a writing of richness and capacity. With meticulous attention to both the forms of poetry and the truths of feeling, she gives us an archaeology of family history, intense gleams of childhood, shards of love and parenting, and a trove of wrenching but cathartic loss and elegy. Readers will leave the book knowing that they’ve held a precious vessel, overflowing with life.
Brian Evans-Jones, former Poet Laureate of Hampshire, UK, and winner of the Maureen Egan Award from Poets & Writers
When you drive, the road goes under the car and comes out the back. Jean Anne Feldeisen’s collection takes the reader on an unexpected journey to the South Jersey shore. As the author sorts through the prickly and priceless lives of the Downers, the reader is swept into the “urgent grip of the familiar,” and soon crisscrosses his own life, wondering, what is my story, and who will need that story?
Beth Fox, widely published poet living in New Hampshire. Author of Reaching for the Nightingale (Finishing Line Press, 2024)
With poems as smooth as sand-grains slipping through the funnel of an hourglass, Jean Anne Feldeisen’s South Jersey Sand is a poignant exhumation of familial memories seen through a lens that is at once tender, gritty, and unabashedly brave.
Lauren WB Vermette, 14th Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH; Author of And The Form Falls Away (Bee Monk Press, 2018)
May 2023
My first poetry chapbook, Not All Are Weeping, is released.
Many of you may be asking, “What is a chapbook?” In poetry publishing, a chapbook is a small, focused collection of poems, usually 30-40 pages. It is not merely a collection of poems but a project with at least some coherence. It is not a collection of all the poems written in the past two years, for example, but a selection of poems that go together in some way. My poems are dedicated to my mother, Mildred E. Felsberg, and are organized around issues of aging, loss, and grief, as well as the painful reckonings we must make with ourselves at times. There are also some fantastical adventures with an orchestra full of trees and a confounding winter sleigh ride.
Catching Fireflies by Jean Feldeisen and Argy Nestor is here:
A beautiful book of poetry and images riffing on the seasons in Maine.
Catching Fireflies is a picture book for adults, an exploration of the fleeting nature of the changing seasons, our respect for the cycles of nature, and our delight in being part of this spectacle.
My friend Argy Nestor and I have been working on this project for nearly two years and are pretty excited about the results. It began with Argy making collages, and other images in response to my poems, and then we traded, and I wrote poems inspired by her images. A few we did together at the same time. Then, we worked with a young graphic designer, Natasha Clement, at Down East Graphics to marry Argy’s images art and my poetry. We have our gorgeous books, now, and are excited to share them with you. Books can be purchased from Jean or Argy by emailing either address below.
The purchase price for Catching Fireflies is $25 plus a $5 fee for shipping and handling. Contact Jean at empowermepeople@gmail.com or Argy at meartsed@gmail.com. Let us know if you want the books autographed or not.
Dear Milly is my parents’ love story. I know many people have similar ones. When I was finally old enough to be given the privilege of reading the letters my parents had written to each other when they were newly in love during my father’s service in the US Navy in World War II, I wanted to write a book about the relationship that they developed. I wanted to talk about it’s beginning in Alaska and Philadelphia, PA, Pleasantville, New Gretna and Galloway, New Jersey. I wanted to add a bit about the future generations that have sprung from it. It is partly a typical story and partly a very special one. I know my mother loved the story and read it over and over in the last two years of her life. If it is poorly formatted and rushed at the end, it was because I dearly wanted to finish it in time for her to enjoy.
The story begins with Ted’s father running off to pan for gold in the Alaskan Gold Rush. It follows his life after he heads back to New Jersey, marries Susanna and starts a family, losing everything in The Great Depression, rebuilding his life and raising his three children. Then there is Minnie Mathis and Fred Shropshire who raise five children in the country through these same bleak times. Mildred Ethel is the second child. When Ted is a high school student in Pleasantville, New Jersey, he leaves school and enrolls in the United States Navy at seventeen to help the World War II effort.
Milly is training as a Cadet Nurse at England General Hospital in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Home on leave and visiting his mother in the hospital, Ted finds his mother anxious to fix her son up with the lovely woman who has been her nurse. The two meet and almost immediately fall in love and begin writing letters the next day. Milly treasures these letters and saves them up in a shoe box tied with pink ribbon. They develop a close relationship after only a few brief visits and continue writing letters as Ted is sent overseas. Meanwhile, the war ends, and the couple is anxious to be together again, though Ted is busy in the Marshall Islands cleaning up after the war, awaiting discharge. The letters continue.
Then Ted comes home to give his love a ring and finally be together with her. But first, Ted and Milly need to get to know each other in real life. After a tumultuous year, they marry and begin a family together. This is the story of that family through good times and bad, and of the love that they held for each other “’til the end of time.”
The purchase a copy of Dear Milly, visit amazon.com.
Mildred Ethel Felsberg 1926-2021
Milly died four days short of her 95th birthday. She will be greatly missed by all who knew her but especially by her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
Jean Feldeisen 