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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