Seventeen poems were submitted for our February prompt of “red,” and they ranged from a mere hint of blush to an all-out fiery passion of RED. (I’m still fanning myself.)

They told stories; they played with colors; they were about love and faith and love lost and philosophy and coming of age and everything else red. Some poems were quiet; some were quite loud. Some were hopeful; others about dashed hope. Some were technically beautiful; others were warm and personal.

Every single poem was a joy to read, and I found myself moved in many different ways. Who would have thought that “red” evoked so many different emotions?

While I would like to highlight them all, our practice is to select one, and so I ended up looking to the frigid north and discovered passion burning, where “Canada burns like a cardinal against our snow.” Here is Matthew Kreider’s “Red Heat:”

Red Heat

on this day
in Winnipeg
even polar bears
watch us from Broadway,
and we sit and love
on these historic steps
leading up to our Hotel Fort Garry,
and hold, for a time,
icy bottles of cream soda and
the condensation and rings
drive us mad, with love,
and people hit their brakes
and honk at us,
smiling at your wedding dress,
here in the northern sunlight,
but then we had to leave it
in your parents’ basement, for a

time to cross

a country and then a sea
of wild rye and nodding needles
and the cold concrete
at the border station, with its
erect black uniforms, silver
sunglasses and
latex fingers and,
the prairie wind howls,
whips
at the bare skin of our heart,
raised today like a flag
between two countries.

Oh, Canada burns like a cardinal against our snow.

and so we roar and stomp
and leave one paw-print
of red
in our snow
and then go to bed
and wait for the visible
light to change
to faith, some smoldering,
infrared glow.

Here’s the complete list of poems in the order submitted. Note that four poems were posted directly on the T.S. Poetry Facebook page, so you might have to scroll down to find them.

Monica Sharman’s What It Feels Like
Glynn Young’s Red Mass
Tony Maude’s Red
Violet Nesdoly’s Adolescence
Nicole Monseu Wian’s Red
Maureen Doallas’s Looking for Meaning in Red
Jennifer Butler-Burton’s Does Red Mean Love
Connie Mace’s Red Speaks
Mary Harwell Sayler’s What Happened When I Searched My Poems with Red
Anna’s The Give-away
Grace Marcella Brodhurst-Davis Every Day Poems
G. M. Brodhurst-Davis’s Matador
Michelle Ortega’s Rouge/red
Matthew Kreider’s Red Heat
Susan Carlin’s e on the palette
Juliana Kim Shavin’s Red Elixir
Jody Ohlsen Collins’ Read Red
Cindee’s To Wrap You in Red

Photograph by Claire Burge. Used with permission. Post by Glynn Young, author of Dancing Priest: A Novel

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Buy a year of Every Day Poems, just $2.99— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In February we’re exploring the theme Red.

It’s interesting how the brain makes connections.

We’ve been celebrating the color red here this month at Tweetspeak, so red has been a bit on my mind. Valentine’s Day has something to do with the color red, not to mention that February is National Heart Month in the United States.

Last Friday, my wife and I went to see a movie. It was chilly, she pulled the hood of her coat up, and my brain went head, hood, red, cape, and it was on to grandmother’s house we go.

Then I took a walk Saturday morning, a two-mile roundtrip from our house to the center of our St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood. And head-hood-cape-red kept playing in my mind. All it took was a red convertible (with the top up; it is February, after all) to drive by, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Red Whistles at the Wolf

Red, Red’s riding in the hood
scarf on her head
lady looking good

Red, Red’s driving in the hood
convertible blush
lady’s in a rush

Lipsticked red
sunglasses red
tight dress red
retro retro red red red

Red, Red’s cruising in the hood
white hubcapped wheels
bringing those meals

Red, Red’s speeding in the hood
in her redfinned missle
gives the wolf a whistle

Red, Red’s roaring in the hood
wolf takes a jump
becomes a speed bump

Red, Red’s slowing in the hood
wolf’s now dead
don’t mess with Red

Photograph: 1960 Red Chrysler Imperial Convertible (The Imperial Club). This is similar to the car Red was driving when she whistled at the wolf. Post by Glynn Young, author of Dancing Priest: A Novel

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Buy a year of Every Day Poems, just $2.99— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In February we’re exploring the theme Red.

It was another Twitter poetry party, and the poetic lines just glistened. Here are the first seven poems of our recent TweetSpeak Poetry-sponsored meet-up/mash-up poetry slam.

Lace Under the Stars

By @llbarkat, @ericswalberg, @Doallas, @lauraboggess, @jejpoet, @mmerubies, @monicasharman, @SandraHeskaKing, @kellysauer, @dukeslee, @pathoftreasure, and @chrisyokel. Lurking by @monicabrand (who guessed the source for the prompts – Macbeth by William Shakespeare). Edited by @gyoung9751.

Liquid color in my arms

Gin, wine, vodka, what’s your
liquid color in my arms,
distilling drops of warm light?
I listen to a voice sing whiskey
and gin, thinking about you
growing up back then.
Warm light, warm gin,
warm voice at the window,
the sun gins his reflection
his high-frequency color pours
through into a silvered net,
its liquid heat and red translucence
warms the belly through.
The moon shines
beyond the sunset.

Eternal questions

What’s your splicing frequency?
Can you separate a seed
as small as thyme’s?
The seeds of thyme spark regret.
We plant these seeds and they grow
into children and who are we then?
Them or us? Is the farmer his farm?
The singer his song?
The farmer borne to the wind
rides on an evening gin,
a tonic to regret.

The moon shines always

The moon shines always,
when I’m in your arms.
We spin our rhymes
on the world wide web
of verse and song,
typing and singing
all night long. What
fruit is borne in every
second wind?
Regret we drown in gin.

The last sober leaf

We spin to the last sober leaf as
the leaf’s shadow turns in the sun.
I turn the leaf, a finger unfurled,
stretching to touch what has withdrawn.
Tomorrow, perhaps, I’ll turn over
a new leaf. Or instead I’ll prop up
the old one and hide in the weeds.

The leaf is browning

The leaf is browning, not budding,
forgotten the unfurling, forgotten
the stretch, forgotten the bud.
The leaves shed their green dresses,
dawned red ones, then yellow,
then they dried up and danced away.
Left with cold and empty trees,
I wonder if spring will really come.
Am I waiting on nothing?
The forgotten things turn, the
browning leaves fall, the leaf turns
and for a moment, we remember.

The first spring

The ecstasy of that first spring
into your embrace shadowed
my bud while I shed my green dress.
Our breath gold-rimmed and gold
running through our veins,
we stand no chance to catch time
as a breath, shallowing, things forgotten.

You have forgotten more than I will
ever experience. Your brain spins
webs I can only imagine. You are
high above me, and I dream that I am
waiting on the forgotten. I step light
into brown falling. Am I nothing
in waiting, in leaving behind
my origin? You could love me,
a skirt blowing in the breeze.

Under the cool surface

We slip under the cool surface.
I don’t like the taste of alcohol,
but I like the sounds of the names.
I like saying Mimosa and Tall
Gin Fizz and Sex on the Beach.

Withdraw me.
Tilt the glass.
Empty our yesterdays.

Photo by Kelly Sauer. Used with permission.

When I think of red, I think of Rothko.

One afternoon in a cottage above the Missouri River, I sat with a friend and blathered about poetry. She listened closely. She realized I was talking about words like a painter might talk about primary colors.

“Do you know Mark Rothko’s work?” she asked.

“Not really,” I answered.

Friendly bikers could be heard below on the Katy Trail. A cool wind marched through the screened-in porch and brought cow smell and lilac. I got on Google and quickly became entranced by Rothko’s No. 15, Untitled.

Red and gold.

This introduction to Rothko spurred me to a flurry of inspiration that would culminate in a literary triptych (three sections of 15 poems). Rothko’s powerful choices of red, gold, yellow, are prominent in the resulting 45-poem swath.

For me, the painting cannot be separated from the poems. Rothko might concur, for he said, “A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer.”

Sensitive and inspired, I slung a new layer of oil on top of Rothko’s canvas—romantic stories set in the natural and cultural landscape of my home in the Ozarks. Was the painting ultimately quickened by my activity? Maybe yes, maybe no. But I was surely quickened, as I came home to red.

6 | Rothko’s Reds

We are joined at the hipbones
like Rothko’s reds. Slight spaces
between like woman man skin
sticking, unsticking—blotchy fuzz
Rothko wrists into the painting.
No matter how you triangulate the canvas,
you see us. Naked pulsing red mists—
no boundaries on land,
pond, and autumn gold field.

Post by Dave Malone, author of Under the Sycamore.

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Buy a year of Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In February we’re exploring the theme Red.

In Night of the Republic: Poems, poet Alan Shapiro loads his minds-eye camera with film (or, these days, a disk) and takes a series of detailed, rather stark photographs. His subjects are the common, everyday things we notice only when we need them but generally ignore: a car dealership, a gas station restroom, a park bench, a dry cleaner, a swimming pool, a museum, a doorbell, a funeral home.

Shapiro’s poetic photographs are sharp and clear; we’re not left guessing the subject. But they often lead in an unexpected direction, as common, everyday things can do. Consider “Barbershop,” which becomes a meditation on eternity:

Eternity is the spiral up the poles
spiraling to its endless end.
Time is the vitrine
of antiquated gels,
conditioners, restoratives,
stray sections from yesterday’s Today
all over the table
in the waiting area where
Eternity is waiting…

These are poems to be read two and three times, and then two or three times more, like photographs that need to be reexamined to see how new angles or shades or colors can change the created whole. In “Stone Church,” for example, the emphasis on the stone construction gives way to what happens inside:

…At night, high
over the tiny
galaxy of candles
guttering down
in dark chapels
all along the nave,
there’s greater
gravity inside
the grace that’s risen
highest into rib
vaults and flying
buttresses, where
each stone is another
stone’s resistance to
the heaven far
beneath it…

These photograph-like poems, or poetic photographs, are filled with quiet wonder. And like fine photographs, their meanings can keep changing. Night of the Republic is a stellar collection of poetry.

Shapiro, who has won several poetry awards, is a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is also publishing his first novel, Broadway Baby, in January.

Some of the most powerful stories in the Bible are about women – Eve, Sarah, Deborah, Ruth, Esther, Mary, Mary Magdalene, the woman at the well, and the woman who touched Jesus’s clothes, to mention a few of the more obvious ones. Their stories are stories of sin, disbelief, leadership, faithfulness, courage, faith and steadfastness. These stories speak to both men and women, and most likely because they are most of all human stories, things we recognize and understand.

In poetry, these stories can become our stories. That’s what poet Tania Runyan accomplishes in A Thousand Vessels: Poems – to write both poems about Biblical characters and non-Biblical characters and situations, to help see the connections to the stories in the Bible and how they apply to us. From “Beach Walk:”

I wore my leopard bikini like the mannequin
at Bullock’s: shoulders back, breasts out,
fingertips light on my hips. Dina swiveled
her buttocks in a fuchsia French-cut
that pointed like an arrow between her thighs…

Poems about Dinah (the sister of the 12 sons of Jacob) and her rape are paired with a poem about child sex offenders. Poems about the woman at the well in the gospel of St. John are paired with a poem about the sins committed by a child against another child. Poems about Esther are grouped with a poem about walking on a beach. The stories of Jairus’s daughter are matched to a poem about children who nearly die. In “Children of Near-Death,” Runyan describes the near death of a 10-year-old named Edward:

…I dove. No more stuttering in Class. No more stinky
dodgeball courts, the cool kids lobbing
at my face. I swam deeper

a million pounds of water behind me. Kelp waved at me
like a crowd gathered in the grandstand.
Wrapped around my arms and legs

till I couldn’t get loose. Darkness…

These are not all dark poems. To the contrary, these are hopeful poems, not the least for the biblical characters represented and described. But what the addition of the non-Biblical poems does is to make the Biblical characters recognizable and contemporary – the woman who makes a terrible mistake, the woman who scoffs, the woman who assumes a leadership role, the woman who is faithful and caring even when no one expected her to be.

In that sense, A Thousand Vessels becomes a contemporary application of the Biblical stories. It’s a wonderful collection, full of faith, hope and truth.

Quick: name a contemporary love poem.

Hard, right? In contemporary poetry, one doesn’t find much about love – the emotion, the feeling, the condition that is so characteristics of a considerable body of poetry from earliest times to the 20th century. Think Song of Solomon, the Greeks and Romans. Think of Boccaccio, the Elizabethans (those sonnets!) and the Cavalier poets, the Romantics and even the Victorians.

But something happened in the century just past. Perhaps two world wars, a major depression, the rise of the media and the dominance of Freudian psychology pushed love poetry into a forgotten corner. I’ve even heard that feminism made love poetry a dangerous occupation. Whatever the cause or causes, love poetry isn’t what it has been in times before ours.

Which makes Dave Malone’s book of poetry Under the Sycamore all the more remarkable. Malone, the author of several books of poetry and a university professor, first published the book in 2003. It is a volume of 100 poems, all untitled and all short (the longest is eight lines). And they are all poems about love – love yearned for, love found, love lost, love regained – almost a story of a relationship that happens over an entire lifetime.

He begins:

Looking at the stars,
I have one thought
where I’m holding you
until they disappear.

And then this:

The moonlight on your face
through the open window
is actually my breath.

These short poems are filled with longing and passion, the self- and shared knowledge of two lovers, along with emptiness, loss and then reconciliation.

I lost my way in the snow
until I heard your voice
in the swirling wind.

To read these poems (and to read them aloud) is to sit in a well-lit, under-furnished room, watching the object of your love, who is unaware of being observed. Under the Sycamore is a beautiful volume of love poems. We need more of them.

It was another Twitter Poetry party, and this one started with a few rumors. All of the prompts were taken from Rumors of Water by L.L. Barkat. And it’s rumored that quite a number of poems emerged during the jam. We’ll have to wait and see what develops. You can’t be too careful about rumors.

Here are first seven poems from the jam.

Rumors of a Blue Geography

By @llbarkat, @Doallas, @kellysauer, @pathoftreasure, @amberleepb, @RachelleEaton, @divyaasachdeva and @shewhodid. Retweets by @wichmans, @cathiejoy, @shellartistree, @KChavda, @Skookum86, @kruss984, @LaundryLineDiv, @EscapeIntoLife, @umeshnrao, and @CarlyRocks. Edited by @gyoung9751.

Rumors of girls in white dresses

I’ve heard there are rumors
of girls in white dresses
and a woman behind a lens
and a boat with no dress.
Float at your own pace,
fingers dangling,
catching the current.
If I tread the water,
will it weep?
And what of the woman
and the white dress asleep?
How will I write
the white dresses
and the boat
and the fingers.
Oh, I want to write
the fingers…
White moon in a white dress
and me wishing for the next dance.
Can a dress dance
alone?
And a dress:
can it have wings?

How will I write?

How will I write
how the color of your eyes
falls at dusk,
lighting my way?
If life has no symmetry
but the water has waves
the color of your eyes,
perhaps that is symmetry
enough?

She follows the moon

She follows the moon
and dances with the stars;
her fingers disrupt,
catch a wrong chord,
cause disharmony.

She says:
Catch me without disharmony
catch me at the chord
to the left of the little hollow
at the base of my neck.
Catch me alone
or with a purple moth.
I really don’t care
how you catch me
with or without cause
with or without story.

She says:
There will be a purple moth
in every chapter
wings bent as a page
where the story waits to be
picked up again.
At the base of my neck
you’ll find the point
where our story
once began.

The fingers are playing

The fingers are playing
with keys and with strings
and silk faerie strands,
the touch light,
as the moth’s wings
the shivery slide of a nail
against skin
leaving me
rumors of water,
or the touch
that echoes the wing
the memory of lightness
Nails, skin
again storying my dress
and its whiteness.

Pan does laundry, too

Pan could play a laundry cup;
he still knows how to play.
The flute is in the movement;
I will follow Pan,
play his notes again
to echo your message written
inside this laundry-soap cap
you twist and turn with no effort
Shivery slide,
caps glide,
a twist, a turn
you’ll learn my message:
that Pan might make music
to woo us
into the lightness of a bubble
ascending.
The cap flies, spilling words
on the white-winged dress.
In the bubbles
we could rise and
see the world
through rainbow eyes.
A stroke it will be
dear lady
to make laundry of our love;
Just don’t leave me
rumors of laundry.

Spilling words

Spilling words
spilling wings
all this spilling
and I am ascending.
Pool the letters into hands;
pour them into words;
drink them down.
Pool the letters
into my mouth
and my lips will
spill them sweet
to you again

Laundry love

Love is tangled shirts
the hem of a skirt
caught in the brass button
of your jeans.
We hang it out
to dry,
a line of words
glimmering
like those rumors
rising among night whispers.

Ascend to the moon, dear love,
ascend to the moon;
follow the eyes
leading the way.
Let them fly
snapping in the wind.
Laundry love on a line
Ascend to the moon
on a brass button;
ascend the hem
on a line of thread.

Stanley Moss is a poet, a publisher of poetry, and a private art dealer, specializing in Spanish and Italian Old Masters. His first book of poetry was published almost 50 years ago; at Sheep Meadow Press, he’s published such authors as John Ashberry, Stanley Kunitz and Frederico Garcia Lorca (posthumously).

Now Moss has published what must stand as a testament to his career as a poet, God Breaketh Not All Men’s Hearts Alike: New & Later Collected Poems. The poems are dazzling in their breadth, from mythology to art, and from love to religion. There are extended farewells to friends who’ve died; there are poems that celebrate and remember.

Many of the poems are about time and aging. Moss feels time pressing upon him, and he presses back. From “Glutton:”

If I could gorge on time, twirl hours on my fork
and wipe my plate clean with my daily bread,
but I am Time’s pretzel, his pistachio nut.
I wish I were time’s spaghetti carbonara.
I am what he munches, kept on the bar
Long enough for the waitress to take the order,
for Time to be seated, whoever he is –
this Godlike No God who little by little
devours me. Eat , eat my Lord,
you will not swallow me in one gulp…

He keenly feels the loss of friends to death, perhaps a reminder of his own mortality. There were several poems about or dedicated to poet and writer Stanley Kunitz, such as “Autumn:”

In a dream after he died
I received picture postcards
from him every day for two weeks
in a single night – the picture:
blazing maples and walnut trees,
New England in full foliage.
I wept that he should write
To me and my wife in a handwriting not his
in blue ink so often.
Since I do not remember the text,
I suppose the message was:
“Every autumn you know where to find me.”

He remembers swimming across the Hudson River when he was seven; in one excellent poem he compares Walt Whitman to the falling of the World Trade Center towers; he ponders the Holocaust; and he writes a six-poem commentary on Antony and Cleopatra called “Along the Tiber.”

He understands the basic of many religions while he seems to wrestle, like Jacob, with the God of his Jewish faith. And this wrestling becomes more important with age. In fact, many of the poems in this volume are about God, and understanding God.

God Breaketh Not All Men’s Hearts Alike is an extraordinary collection of a man’s life.

I hadn’t read Rodney Jones’s previous books of poetry (this one is his ninth), but I will now that I’ve read Imaginary Logic: Poems. It a collection full of the familiar and the everyday but described in unexpected and precise ways, and with an eye that is focused and accurate.

The poems cover a wide terrain – recollections of youth and childhood, prayers, family relationships, the stories houses tell, and, among others, driving at night through St. Louis (Jones is a professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, about 90 minutes southeast of St. Louis). The poems vary in length from a few stanzas to several pages, but they are all written in distinctly readable and approachable language; this is not so much the poetry of academia as it is the poetry of recognizable life.

One of his longer poems in the collection, “The Previous Tenants,” is about the couple who lived in the house previously to the teller of the story:

The couple who built our house had great plans
for this lot where they would live out their days:
he in dedicated husbandry, priming a garden
with sludge from the sewage plant, hauling stones
from the condemned homesteads by the new lake
to buttress the terraces; and she reading Aquinas
or pouring Pinot Noir for predinner conversations
after her work as a counselor at the women’s center…

But plans don’t work out; he gets Alzheimer’s or something like it while she becomes enraged at what he’s turning into. Jones turns the story into a poetic meditation on death, relationships, and what we leave behind us.

We know them from the colors they left more than their words.
We know them more from the marks they left on the wood
than the pulses that quickened when they entered rooms.
We know the four flower beds. We do not know their love…

These poems are quiet works, reflective, provoking the reader’s own memories of growing up and growing old. It’s a fine collection.

From bees, our recent Twitter poetry party began to transition to swans (that’s how these things can go). Here are next five poems. All of the prompts were taken from Anne Overstreet’s Delicate Machinery Suspended: Poems.

Stories of the Bees 2

By @mmerubies, @llbarkat, @AnneDOvers, @Jeff_Overstreet, @Doallas, @SandraheskaKing, @lindachontos, @gyoung9751, @poetryinabottle, @rosanneosborne, @togetherforgood, @LoveLifeLitGod, @strangejkp, @quietlybananas, @mrsmetaphor and @dthaase. Edited by @gyoung9751.

Swans

The swans, serene, glide across the water, glass.
The swans, their necks of silk fingered softly,
shimmer their wings frosted by spun sunlight;
drift, leaving a trail of memories;
hiss thundering their wings like horses.

Swans in love

The slick of her neck in the bee-fingered sun
sang of summer, summer sweet as honey,
summer soft as a swan’s neck.
Her hand touched his cygnet ring.

The swan girl picked bees from the air,
rescued the ale boy from a sure gold drowning.
The seventh swan-boy, she loved him best.
Spin me a honey tree; kiss my signet ring,

Ring around a tree, golden dance of honeyed autumn;
ring around a stone thrown in.
The swan grays; the temper of that muscle
in the neck the back a ridge of brokenness.

The leaves turn into the gold of honey;
the afternoons cool with the flutter
of swans’ wings. We are past the season
of milk and honey: the swans sleep.

Forgotten are the swans of summer,
the bees floating through the heat.

A story told

A story told in a tracing of palm against palm,
she combed the nettles from her silken hair;
he combed the honey from the hive, he said
wipe the sting of nettles from my hand.

Wipe the memories too and the shadows
and the sour trace of raveled silk. I try to leave
the rind of summer fermenting into harder months
and dreams that begin on soon-dark afternoons.

Let me trace your palm in silver sunlight,
in golden moonlight; let me trace the lines
that lead to hope and leave behind
the memories trailing paths of grief.

The black cat

There is a black cat at my door,
jingling his collar, telling me
summer is gone, and he’d like
to come inside. The black cat
is not the only thing that tells
of winter’s coming.

And the black swan sang and
the black cat wound her tail
around the silver birch.
The cat is made of black silk,
cut from one special bolt
of cloth, lightening bolt, snap!

Snap! went the birch and
the lines and Snap! went
the taut silk. Winter comes
but first, autumn spills
honeyed sunlight upon
the trees, upon the ground.

Eat my rind

Eat my rinds, too,
there is still some
sweetness left in me.
Even the core has
value. Taste it, spit it
out if you must.

For our Twitter poetry party in September, poet Anne Overstreet, author of the recently published Delicate Machinery Suspended: Poems, joined us. The prompts all came from her collection. And we got into bees and moons and ants and rosaries and all manner of things. (It was great fun.) The first five poems are below.

Stories of the Bees

By @mmerubies, @llbarkat, @AnneDOvers, @Jeff_Overstreet, @Doallas, @SandraheskaKing, @lindachontos, @gyoung9751, @poetryinabottle, @rosanneosborne, @togetherforgood, @LoveLifeLitGod, @strangejkp, @quietlybananas, @mrsmetaphor and @dthaase. Edited by @gyoung9751.

Honey-braided shadows

The sun braided shadows in my hair;
the shadows braided memories,
memories of slivered light and
honey-baked hair, honey-combed
highlights in my hair, baking
shadows into nets, catching my heart.

The bumbles braid a choir with honey bees.
It is a silly thing, my fear of bees. So small,
couldn’t really hurt me, right? But the bright
yellow buzz scares. They enter, they leave;
I can never keep track of their unlined path,
this unlined path stretching before my feet.

I’m eager yet afraid to follow the hum
of the bees to the braided sunlight.
The bees rise to braided rows of roses
that for the shivering had not even opened
their eyes. The path I left behind me is lined
with broken pieces, where I jumped too soon.

Bees and yellow jackets

Yellow jackets like nets cast
marked each step. The vibration
of the hive enfolded his hand;
the energy, transferred, traced
red lines in his palm, enfolding
his face, hive-warm, light-combed.
The vibration of the bees enfolded
his heart, the lines in his hands
between heaven and hive.
The lines of bees enter the heart
of the flowers, carrying away
the sweetness. These days are
my hive. This man, with his tongue
heavy with honey, wipes a drop
at the corner of his mouth.
He can never love another.
She will smell my scent on his skin,
where the honey-love stained his flesh.

The song of the bees

The song taken up,
his heart fills, keeping
to the beat of wings,
sending messages
of hope they speak
with dance of wings.
The struck strings
of bee hum the path
of nectar to my mouth.
Honey, I strum.

The Queen arrives

The Queen arrives, her throne embellished
with sticky sweetness of love. In the winter
the Queen sleeps; in Spring she wakes
to blossoms, and swans. The workers rush
to serve; she answers with beating wing.
The hive’s a frenzy in the seasons of blossoms,
the Queen’s guard on watch.
If this is my hive am I the Queen Bee or
just a drone mindlessly working?
I choose to be Queen Bee. I will woo
the worker and feed him my honey soft words.
My love will cling to him like syrup.

Is it so bad to be the mindless drone
gathering nectar from flowers braided
with spun sunlight?

Tiny weavers

Tiny weavers of petaled cloth,
The bees’ rhythms are heard only
by petaled ears. My mind touches
the memory of bees at work.
Mindlessly I trace my memories,
shadows silking an amber past.

Born in Croatia and raised in Slovenia, Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun has published 30 collections of poetry in his native language. His poetry has been translated into more than 20 languages, and he’s had nine collection published in English. The Blue Tower: Poems is the tenth in English, and translated with the author by Michael Biggins of the University of Washington; it was first published in Slovenian in 2007.

To read the poems of The Blue Tower is to become disoriented and dislocated, and that is perhaps the point. Here’s a representative example, from the first poem in the collection, “The Bride Wins Both Times:”

To provoke the pasture’s ladder, to wash out the cat’s message,
What you hear through walls is panic coming here.
In Morocco he whipped slaves. First I open the chest.
The ribs turn gray. I saw nomads, women on horseback. The dog days will
     come dressed in a
T-shirt. I’ll show you hand, my hand is your hand…

This is language being used in an unconventional way, simultaneously drawing attention to itself and pushing the reader to the next phrase the next line, seeking the connections or the context and finally realizing there may not be any (in this poem, in a kind of refutation of the title, there isn’t even a mention of a bride).

Another example of this dislocating action is from the poem “Persia.” But here, the word and idea of “jump” helps to knit the poem together, as does a bit a repetition:

When I jumped on the sieve, the sieve
got sick. The word departed from the flesh and
became the fruit of Nicodemus. No one is free
of gentle bonds, buttons and ribbons
excepted. We dug them in pearlike flutters.
From there a short jump to a branch. Johnny Weissmuller,
Such a well-stitched tarp, where do you see these now? We turned
Gristle into myriads. Into mush. Into pharaohs…

This is not stream of consciousness poetry. Each sentence, each phrase is usually so well contained and tightly written that this isn’t a flow of language but indeed a very careful, heavily crafted use of it.

The effect, interestingly enough, is to push the focus of the poems to the reader, trying to make sense of the phrases and sentences and finally evaluating each phrase and sentence on its own merit and personal meaning.

The Blue Tower is full of arresting ideas and language, but a slow and careful reading is a necessity to grasp them.

From the time I was 8 until I was 14, I spent a week each summer at my grandmother’s house in Shreveport. I would sleep in the second bedroom, which was always called “the back room” even though it and my grandmother’s bedroom formed the back of the house. It was the room with a ceiling door in the closet that led to the attic; it was the room where my grandmother stored a lot of things, including my grandfather’s cane; it was the room and the bed where my grandfather died. That I slept in that bed and in that room never bothered me; instead, I felt closer to him, this man who died when I was nine months old but had shaped so many in the family, including my father.

I was continually reminded of this “back room” while reading former U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall’s The Back Chamber: Poems, a collection filled with memory, desire, imaginings and longings, the collection Hall needed to write as he enters his ninth decade. The title poem captures the essence of the collection:

Here is the houses’ genius: pram and bedstead,
Heart-shaped valentine candy
Boxes, oil lamps, a captain’s chair,
And Ben Keneston’s underwear,
A century ago
Folded away in case it came in handy,
By prudent family dead.

Here chests keep layers of relics: a beaded purse.
A graduation dress
That Ben’s wife Lucy made in homespun,
Reports from school in nineteen-one,
A century ago,
And painted China heads, now bodiless,
From dolls of three dead daughters.

Here, in a few short lines, is memory, family history, relics from that history. Old report cards – the small things of living and the small things of a life that become more important as the end of life becomes closer, not the big, major events of life but the common, everyday things that happen, almost as a matter of course, what Hall refers to in “The Things” as “the masters of the trivial.”

A highlight of the poems is “Ric’s Progress,” which in 21 sections tells the story of Ric, his first and second marriages, how his life changed with the loss of a job, where he ends up at age 60. It’s not exactly a happy ending. As Hall says, “…if stories are happy, they haven’t ended.” The poem series ends with Ric and his second wife Molly contemplating their sagging and wrinkled skin.

These are poems about memories, both real and imagined: old loves, teenage years, the inevitable aging process. Hall’s first wife, poet Jane Kenyon who died at 48, is cited frequently, her shadow looming large in the poet’s mind, as she’s described in the extended poem “Meatloaf:”

…Jane Kenyon, who loved baseball, enjoyed
the game on TV but fell asleep
by the fifth inning, She died twelve years
ago, and thus would be sixty now,
watching baseball as her hair turned right.
I see her tending her hollyhocks,
gazing west at Eagle Pond, walking
to the porch favoring her right knee.
I live alone with baseball each night
but without poems…

It is memory real and memories imagined, the relationships the poet has and with people alive and dead, that so mark this strong collection. These are poems of a life lived long.

The Back Chamber will be published Sept. 13.

On Aug. 10, poet Philip Levine was named the U.S. Poet Laureate by James Billington, Librarian of Congress. Billington called Levine the “laureate of the industrial heartland’ who writes with the voice of the ordinary workingman.

Levine has published more than 20 collections of poetry. What Work Is: Poem won the National Book Award in 1991 and “The Simple Truth,” published in 1995, received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He’s also won many other awards and honors.

At 83, Levine is one of oldest laureates to be named.

Our Valley

By Philip Levine

We don’t see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August
when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay
of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard
when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment
you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost
believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass,
something massive, irrational, and so powerful even
the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it.

You probably think I’m nuts saying the mountains
have no word for ocean, but if you live here
you begin to believe they know everything.
They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine,
a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls
slowly between the pines and the wind dies
to less than a whisper and you can barely catch
your breath because you’re thrilled and terrified.

You have to remember this isn’t your land.
It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside
and thought was yours. Remember the small boats
that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men
who carved a living from it only to find themselves
carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home,
so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust,
wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.

Related:

New York Times: Voice of the Workingman to Be Poet Laureate.

Levine’s biography at the Academy of American Poets.

Levine’s biography at The Poetry Foundation.

The Library of Congress news release, which includes a list of all of the U.S. poet laureates.

Levine reads his poem “A New Day.”

In Greek mythology and popular legend, Orpheus is the musician, the poet, who could charm all with his music. Possibly the son of a king and the muse Calliope, he was one of Jason’s Argonauts; he is said to have perfected the lyre; and is credited as the composed of the Orphic Hymns, some of which survives today. He occupies an important position in Western literary culture, and has been the subject of paintings, poems, operas and many musical compositions.

One of the best known stories about Orpheus concerns his wife Eurydice. Startled by a satyr at their wedding, she falls into a nest of vipers and dies. Orpheus travels to the Underworld, and is allowed to bring her back on the condition that he not look at her until they have departed Hades and reached the upper world. He looks back too soon, of course, and Eurydice is lost forever.

Matthew Duggan, a British poet, has retold the story of Orpheus in Underworld: The Modern Orpheus, a series of 16 poems published as an e-book in late July. This Orpheus is no Greek of mythological time, but a contemporary man, in contemporary times.

And the story is just as haunting, unfolding in a series of images and scenes that are both familiar and mythological.

This Orpheus has turned 40, and his “birthday balloons drift, / like the years had quickened with time / from hardships passed to rare moments of bliss.” He has traveled far and long to find love, and he does ultimately find her, only to lose her: “…her colourful corpse lay with wingless priests / so far from the reaches of love’s blessed arms…”

As Orpheus seeks his love, even the muses weep in what is a moving, lyrical passage that illustrates the language of the entire work:

…a hunched weeping muse collects her tears
like the frequent pebbles that span a beach.
In the dead fields of weathered corn
she rests well under dappled skies of canvas,
in prayer she weeps for songs of hope
from the ghosts and gods that glisten the night.

It is Duggan’s description of Hades that sounds so familiar, so modern, a contemporary urban landscape:

In the realms of the city of the dead
the warrior of song takes a deep breath,
in charcoal towers with skies of coarse red.
Searching the high-streets burnt and bled
in old cafes of timeless death,
in the realms of the city of the dead.

In a city coloured with glossed lead…

In this Hades of “neon skyscrapers,” Orpheus finds himself a player on the stage, following the script written out for him to its inevitable conclusion. He has no choice, really; his fate has been laid out before him.

Duggan has done something wonderful here with this retelling of an old, old story. He’s given it a modern sensibility while remaining true to its mythological origins. And he’s done so using beautiful lines and images that continue to haunt long after the reading is done.

In June, poet Anne Overstreet published her first collection of poems, entitled Delicate Machinery Suspended: Poems. It is about memory and faith, affection and love, work done and work done well, and even playfulness. The poems are about a life observed, but also a life to come. It’s a beautiful work.

Anne’s poems have been published in the Asheville Poetry Review, Radix, DMQ Review, Relief, Talking River Review and several other publications. She is a Soapstone Resident and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. She’s conducted a number of workshops, and her poetry has appeared as part of the Cody Center Exhibition “Pairings” at Laity Lodge in Texas. She lives near Seattle with her husband, author and film critic Jeffrey Overstreet.

We talked with Anne about her poetry, her background and experiences, and the influences on her writing.

Your “home place” — New Mexico — plays an important role in your poems. Can you tell us a little about your background and growing up there?

We actually relocated to Roswell when I was 12 and I remember driving cross-country in the yellow Oldsmobile, muttering under my breath that I was going to hate it hate it hate it there. Now I can’t imagine feeling as connected to any other place the same way. You’re walking on the skin of the earth, moving through the heavens where it touches down. I imagine God breathing and this place is that held space between inhalation and exhalation. Such subtle beauty—you have to be alert to catch spring slipping quietly along the rivers, spilling green across the plains. I used to lie on the ground at Salt Creek and could swear I felt the earth turning. There’s no place like it.

Prior to New Mexico, we moved a fair bit because my dad was in the Army when we were young. Mostly parts of Virginia. Certain rituals provided continuity across the states and into Roswell, where my parents still live. Reading as a family was one. Camping in the mountains. Sundays were for church and feeding people.

In the Acknowledgements, you cite Luci Shaw and several others for helping you be a better writer. How did they do that?

Luci advocates for confidence in one’s work, one’s own voice. I’d say she was my poetic fairy godmother, but I’m not sure godmothers have tattoos and sport leather jackets. Linda has one of the clearest senses of vision I’ve ever encountered and has leant me her eye when I needed it. Stacey listens. Then she tells me what she’s heard, how she experiences what I’ve written. She doesn’t read a lot of poetry—she’s in my sci-fi/fantasy cohort— and she has a fresh ear. Plus, she’s a mean cook. And everyone needs someone who helps make room for you to get your work done, who protects that space. She does that. Derek has been a mentor and a teacher for years. I learn from his work every time I encounter it. There is a balance to every piece he writes that I’d like to achieve. He also sets the bar high for intelligent critique, something I hope I have learned from, and he never hesitates to give his support any time it is asked for.

Who are some of your favorite writers and poets?

Oh that’s an extensive list that is perpetually expanding! Annie Dillard—everything. I will also read anything Kathleen Norris writes. Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale is at the top of the list, as is much of Guy Gavriel Kay’s work, Patricia McKillip’s novels, and the Auralia’s Thread books (yep, I’m a fan of Jeffrey’s work). I’m a big fantasy and fairy tale buff and these authors write gorgeous prose, lyrical and surprising. The kind that stuns you, pulls you under and out into a different state of being.

Poetry, hmm, Pattiann Rogers, Maxine Kumin, Jane Hirschfiedl, Zbiegneiw Herbert, Adam Zagejewski (I particularly like the Polish poets of that period), to begin with. Rogers does this exquisite blending of the divine and science that celebrates fact and design, and yet holds something wild in it. Two of my northwest favorites are Derek Sheffield, whose work is keen, swift, and well-balanced, and Kevin Miller, who, though he has only a few collections out, does place so well. There is a reverence too for the holiness of the ordinary in his poems. These are writers I am in conversation with, at least on page, who I learn from, whose work elicits a response or a question every time I encounter it.

Many of the poems read like a movie camera filming a scene, then shifting to another scene, and then another, effectively (very effectively) combining three or four scenes into a cohesive whole, like in “If It Doesn’t Rain Soon.” Is film/movies an influence here?

You’d expect me to say yes, since my husband Jeffrey is a film critic. And the films I am most drawn to are often image heavy. However, I do think that is a consequence, not a cause or influence. As an undergraduate I studied history and loved reading various texts on one subject, looking at the event from differing perspectives to apprehend the whole. I think I still do that in my poetry.

Faith plays a strong role in your poetry, even when it’s subtle and understated. It’s straightforward in poems like “The Logic of Prayer Rising” and “Annunciation: Triptych” (two of my favorites in the collection) and “The Bearded Lady, Asleep,” but it’s present throughout the poems, which seem to suggest a belief in the order and purpose of things. How would you describe it?

It informs the way I see. Because of it, it is clear to me that we move through a designed world. Moreover, the designer seems so obviously to delight in artistry and variation, in evolutionary innovation. Scientists have recently discovered a shark whose underbelly mimics patterns of light falling through water so that it is virtually invisible from below. How cool is that? We keep discovering. Creation keeps unfolding. God continues to speak it into being, a proper artist.

My faith also gives me permission to ask questions. Scott Cairns talks about poetry being a continuing conversation, a response or reaction perhaps to the poetic tradition. Writing’s my way of engaging with my faith tradition. What do we do with apparent anomalies, like a person who appears to be both male and female, as in “The Bearded Lady”? How could Mary be the same after having been overshadowed by the same spirit that overshadowed the waters and drew the land masses up out of the deep? That sort of thing.

Maybe I am not entitled to answers, but I am free to ask. And ask and ask. Job is a favorite text, as are some of the Psalms. I think we’re supposed to raise questions as part of the conversation, even in the face of doubt, perhaps especially in the face of silence.

Related:

At The High Calling, Anne talks about how she came to write poetry, how various jobs she’s held influenced her writing, and how she uses details to make her poems so powerful.

At Faith, Fiction, Friends, Anne discusses some of the specific poems in the collection.

You can read a review of Delicate Machinery Suspended: Poems here at TweetSpeak Poetry.

You live a life, or perhaps you’ve lived half your life, according to the mortality statistics. To understand the second half, you must first understand the first. To do that, you turn to a variety of tools: memory, questioning, affection and gratitude, love and faith, consideration of jobs held and work done, playfulness and keen, honest, detailed observation.

If you’re poet Anne Overstreet, you do these things and you create Delicate Machinery Suspended: Poems, poetry about a life observed, but also about the life to come. And it is a beautiful collection indeed.

Consider the sorting of a deceased relative’s household, from “Day of the Dead:”

I leave my husband there in Maricopa at one with its bank,
one diner, one gas station, to sort through the almost empty
house that I can’t bear to face. We’ll take what we can use

and forsake the hollow egg collection, a leather glove that
needed a running stitch to close a rent. There’s a lacquered box
one of her nieces made, quite ugly, mouth framed by stiffened

Sargent series brushes (No. 8). A mobile of red-crested cranes
eddies and tinks like a quartet of tuneless pianos. Soon we’ll be
six states away from where we last broke bread with her…

Is this what life comes down to, the poet seems to ask: an almost empty house, a hollow egg collection, an ugly lacquered box and a mobile? In the second part of the poem, the poet escapes into nature but doesn’t find the needed contrast:

Down the road a few miles I pull off and pace the trickle
they call a river around here, fading into the ground
in posts like train song. In the language of leaving

there is no returning migration of snow geese,
the peregrination of a red hawk turns
only clockwise, and marigolds come into their own

only on the day of the dead; there is no other color like theirs.
My eye thinks chromium yellow. But, perhaps not.
In the grebe’s nest among the river-reed bower, in the shroud

of the snake skin tossed to the side like a T-short at bedtime,
the abandoned speak their half-shaped language,
the life gone out of them as it always does.

The scene shifts, but the reality, in all of its intricate detail, remains startlingly similar. The empty house with its remnants of a life lived, and the “trickle they call a river around here” both suggest much about our mortality. Overstreet observes with the camera’s eye, capturing detail and nuance like filmmaking close-ups, a technique she uses in poems like “If It Doesn’t Rain Soon” as well, where her eye shifts from a man walking along a street to traffic passing a lounge and a video store, a woman sitting in a lawn chair, a snapshot of activity at a fire station, and a neighbor sitting at a kitchen table, and through each scene the suggestion of heat, humidity and needed rain. It’s an arresting approach, this camera eye moving quickly, capturing the sense of what this moment is like, assimilating and understanding.

This close and careful observation can be seen throughout the volume’s poems. Here is the description of a “Rental,” (which took me back almost four decades to my first apartment in an old building):

Dust sifts through the floorboard
gaps, settles along a lintel
that has begun to pull back
from the doorway. Everything
that could be done on the cheap,
by hand, is letting go,
having done enough and more.
Old glass warps and blurs the street
into a torrent of chrome. We’ve learned
to listen to what the stairs say,
for water in the walls, for mice.
This house eases and groans
under a roof that keeps the two of us,
the cat, and a view of the cedar
flexing and stretching in the wind
for as long as its roots hold.
We can afford agreement
of nail and plaster and wood
to hold, for now, together.

This is a home in an old building, of course, but it is also more –it is a life, a family and relationships, holding together by agreement and observation. Here, as in many of Overstreet’s poems, one also finds a subtle affection and even gratitude for the people who have helped create this life the poet knows.

The poems can be simultaneously playful and serious, as when they do a slight retelling of the “Little Red Riding Hood” fairy tale, in “Sleeping in Grandmother Wolfe’s House” and “Red #9.” You smile as you read them, and then the smile gives way to serious consideration. Overstreet is not simply retelling a fairy tale; she is considering what fairy tales mean in dream-like renderings.

This same playful-yet-serious sense of life is seen in one of the most beautiful poems of the collection, “Soufflé,” which begins as a description of the preparation of a soufflé but becomes an incredible love poem.

This collection, Overstreet’s first, displays a command of language, style and content that is deeply affecting. You are watching a series of scenes filmed with the eye of an artist. And what she paints in Delicate Machinery Suspended of her life observed is a beautiful and wondrous thing.
___

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Below are three additional poems from the recent Twitter poetry party. All of the prompts came from Neruda’s Memoirs: Poems by Maureen Doallas.

By @mmerubies, @lauraboggess, @llbarkat, @loveLifeLitGod, @Dancinbutterfly, @doallas and @jejpoet. Edited by @gyoung9751

The line held too taut

The line snaps
because I hold it too tight;
life’s reel turns back
and loops as it did
the day we said goodbye.
Pieces break off, shatter; they
get lost along the way, not
to be found until year later
when I glue them together
to make a blue vase.
Sometimes they can
never be found again.

The mermaid breathes

Like a mermaid, she is neither this
nor that, only half-become,
of two natures warring, in need
of both water and air. If she
could breathe under water, like
a silver fish or a mermaid,
would she need no other elixir?

But her need for air reels her in,
like a pulley taut, back to her humanity,
and to his; she carries too a thread
sewing the silver fish into necklaces
and wings, reeling in the thread;
turning and dipping like fins all
out of breath for her lover.

Does she wait for the mermaids,
the silver fish, the night pulled taut?
Somehow she learns to breathe.
Satisfied she turns:
You’ll learn, she says,
to let your lover go
to breathe upon the hills.

And the breaths will knock
at the broom tree, tie it in circles
against the falling night,
a passing touch, like an elixir
from a Chinese jar,
each breath a vapor
disappearing in the tide.

Give me your fins, she says.
You cannot breathe like that,
on dry ground. Give up your fins,
and I will hand you my wings,
I will restore what’s lost
with lover’s passing
if you will only leave me alone.

The line pulled taut again

Nothing is lost;
it just reloops
as life’s reel
has a way
of continuously
starting over
but in doing so
new twists and
turns are added.
Reel in the thread,
pull it taut,
make of it
circles tying
heart to heart.

And I laugh
while it spirals,
and the circles
fill my eyes
until I look
drastic
cartoon-crazy
unhinged and
vacant.
I skim the
surface of
love’s voice,
calling.

In his letters, the Apostle Paul usually addresses the churches, such as the churches at Corinth and Thessalonica. In his letters to the Ephesians and the Philippians, Paul speaks to the “saints.” Peter speaks to “God’s elect.” But while different terms are used, all are generally understood to mean the people – the living people – who comprised the churches in these cities. When Paul wrote to the saints in Ephesus and Philippi, he was not addressing people who had been recognized and canonized as something special and different after their deaths. And so too today, in most of the Protestant traditions (Anglican and Episcopal being obvious exceptions), the terms “saints” refers to the living, breathing members of the church.

And then there’s Saint Sinatra.

I have to say that I laughed when I saw the title of this collection of poems by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell. I’ve never really considered Frank Sinatra a saint, even in his early singing career when young women (like my mother) swooned over those famous blue eyes. Yet his poem, the title poem, leads this volume. And it should.

It is a collection that is at once serious and humorous, focused and yet playful. It speaks to and about saints who are both familiar and known for being saints (like “St. Kate,” or Catherine of Siena), as well as those who are not – like St. Ikaros, the mythical Icarus who flew too close to the sun. And O’Donnell includes a variety of literary figures to populate her saintly domain here – like St. Seamus (Heaney, the poet), St. Melville and St. Hawthorne, St. Edna (Vincent Millay) and St. Emily (Dickinson).

The idea here seems to be that these figures are all saints, have all been found worthy of sainthood, be that for singing, writing, painting (Van Gogh and Turner) and even playing the saxophone (Clarence Clemmons, who played with Brice Springsteen.)

The poem entitled St. Seamus, for the Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner, is a kind of praise and giving thanks psalm, and is an indication of how O’Donnell has written and organized her poems.

St. Seamus

For years I’ve knelt at your holy wells
and envied the cut of your clean-edged song,
lain down in the bog where dead men dwell,
grieved with ghosts who told their wrongs.

Your consonants cleave my soft palate.
I taste their music and savor it long
past the last line of the taut sonnet.
Its rhyming subtle, its accent strong.

And every poem speaks a sacrament,
blood of blessing, bread of the word,
feeding me full in language ancient
as Aran’s rock and St. Kevin’s birds.

English will never be the same.
To make it ours is why you came.

There is much to plumb in this poem, not the least of which is the connection between art and faith, or how art expresses faith, and how faith is revealed in art.

The poems in the volume are not limited to saints; there is also one called “The Conversation,” which is almost like a news account of the one face-to-face meeting of Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, and the Polish-Lithuanian-American Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. The two had corresponded for years: their one meeting was a in a restaurant in San Francisco in 1968, and it is imaginatively recreated by O’Donnell here, including these lines:

He made me Milosz, you Merton,
and neither of us home
and sent us on a pilgrimage to find it.
We have seen on our way and fallen in love
With the world that will pass in a twinkling.
The maker loves the maker and the made.

Other poems include O’Donnell’s responses to seeing Vincent Van Gogh’s “Sower with Setting Sun” on the feast day of St. Francis and an exhibition of paintings by J.M. W. Turner at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

O’Donnell teaches English, Creative Writing and American Catholic Studies at Fordham University in New York City. She’s previously published two chapbooks and a full-length collection of poems, Moving House. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Christian Century, Comstock Poetry Review, Potomac Review and Xavier Review, among many others. She’s also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Web Prize, and was finalist for the Foley Poetry Award, the Elixir First Book award and the Mulberry Poets & Writers Award.

And in Saint Sinatra, she’s given us the poetry of the saints, all of the saints, including those who are recognizably ourselves.
____

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