Sunday, May 12, 2013

Coffee House Confessions by Ellaraine Lockie






Coffee House Confessions

Silver Birch Press

Los Angeles CA

© Copyright 2013, Ellaraine Lockie

ISBN-13: 978-0651727677

Softbound, $10, 43 pages



Review by Zvi A. Sesling



How many times have you sat in a coffee house or café observing people, taking notes or writing poetry? Most poets have at one time or another. In the back of Coffee House Confessions, Ellaraine Lockie’s tenth volume of poetry, it states she, “writes every day in a coffee shop no matter where she is in the world.”



Often we find her in a Starbucks, but no matter, the poems carry humor and keen observation as in White Noise and Other Muses:



The woman sitting next to me in Starbucks says

I wish I were as dedicated to something

as you to whatever you do here every day

Little does she know I’m eating her alive

Dissecting her and spitting her out on paper



Or in another poem titled Ashes:



He’s been to this Starbucks before

Someone at a nearby table says

he rotates to avoid arrest

A mountain man or maybe Santa Claus look

Except skinny as a stage-four Jesus

Guitar on top of his grocery cart

over piles of clothes and a bag of cat food

Cat food, when there’s no place for a cat

Twenty-six degrees last night and damp





But not everything is stateside or Starbucks. Indeed we find her in Italy and Portugal and other unnamed locations, yet each poem provides insight into the people at each site.



A few samples include Man About Town in which “His stride was a study in meter/And any female looking his way/from the Leaf and Bean/as he crossed the street/would become an immediate student”



Or there is the study of a female in Short-Shorts on Midlife Legs: “Does she know/how the back of her thighs/look without shadow of shade



Ms. Lockie knows what to look for and how to put it down on paper. The latter was in a Peet’s somewhere that doesn’t really matter because it is the observation and its placement on the page that brings it all to life.



In reading this I was often chuckling or smiling inside at the descriptions of people who might turn purple if they read this book and recognize themselves. Are you one of them? After all, one of the coffee houses could be in your town.





__________________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling

Reviewer for Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene

Author, King of the Jungle and Across Stones of Bad Dreams

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 7

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