If I Take You Here by Martha Carlson-Bradley

If I Take You Here
by Martha Carlson-Bradley
Copyright 2010 by Martha Carlson-Bradley
Adastra Press
Easthampton, MA 01027
Softbound, 34 pages, $18.00
ISBN 10: 0-9822495-9-4
ISBN 13: 978-0-9822495-9-8

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

In reading chapbooks from Adastra Press, Gary Metras’s publishing house in Easthampton, MA, I have never been disappointed by the poetry they contain and If I Take You There is no exception. Martha Carlson-Bradley has woven together poems of appealing and clear images that churn up visuals as you read.

If I take you here
what do I hope?

that our eyes will focus
in the same direction –

low hills, for both of us,
edging in the field?

Or here, inside:
why should you

witness the sofa
too formal to sit on
Victorian horsehair –

or the Times watch
as it ticks on the bureau
the tips of its hands

green with radium?

My grandfather’s bedroom
narrow, long as a freight car,

holds its one note:
half warning, half lament


Here is another example:

Something broken grates underfoot.

Chilled, with my hands in raincoat pockets,
I study the Last Supper

my family discarded.

Disciples hold their sudden gestures –
fist on money bag, a finger point.

Tender flesh of a palm


Here, like DaVinci, the moment is captured, the action frozen as today, money is the key to the moment, the trapdoor of action, the sale of life. Religion broken down to its monetary base, its evil. Even at the end of a life, someone must make a profit, though not the victimh.

Here are scattered lines from other poems:

• A drip from the faucet; a tick of the clock
• Only winter birds a speaking
• a shot glass is lying; knocked on its side
• Exactly the hue of old photographs
• the world outside like flame

These are just five examples of what I think are creative images, clever use of what might be everyday things that we tend to overlook, even as poets, because we are too busy with our own lives, our own language to notice the obvious and make it not only creatively accessible to a reader, but provides a quick, Oh, I wish I’d thought of that. It is this kind of “fun reading” one can usually find in a Metras published volume of poetry.

“MADNESS” KICKS OFF POETRY SERIES AND NEW POETRY VENUE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“MADNESS” KICKS OFF POETRY SERIES
AND NEW POETRY VENUE

MADNESS AT THE GROLIER
UPSTAIRS AT BLOC 11
11 Bow Street, Somerville
November 6, 2011 at 3:30 P.M.

Madness is the theme, poetry the vehicle, enjoyment the promise when the Grolier Poetry Book Shop inaugurates its new poetry room above the Bloc 11 Café in Union Square, Somerville. Billed as a “wild concoction of poetry, mixed media and twisted genius”, “Madness” is a celebration of the borderlands where madness brushes against artistic genius, as evidenced most notably in the community of famous poets—Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell and John Berryman—whose lives and writings cycled tortuously through McLean Hospital in Belmont.


Not an ordinary fundraiser, nor an ordinary poetry reading, “Madness at the Grolier,” is a kickoff fundraiser for the Grolier Poetry room, a fledgling satellite of The Grolier Book Shop, an all-poetry book store that has become a Harvard Square literary landmark. “Madness at the Grolier” will be the first of an ongoing series of thematic poetry events.


Well-known local poets and writers who will read from the works of the McLean poets, as well as their own, include Doug Holder, himself a counselor and poetry workshop leader at McLean for almost thirty years, poet and singer Lo Galluccio, novelist Paul Steven Stone and Alice Weiss. Robert Clawson, manager of Anne Sexton’s band will present poetry and anecdotes, Kathleen Spivack will share her memories of Robert Lowell, soon to be published in memoir form, and Lois Ames who wrote the introduction to Plath's "Bell Jar," will talk about her friendship with Plath and Sexton.


Last but far from least, local poet and performer Michael Mack will offer powerful vignettes from his wrenching one-man show chronicling the pain of growing up with a schizophrenic mother.


“Madness at the Grolier” is a joint presentation of the Grolier Book Shop, Ibbetson Street Press and Blind Elephant Press. Like madness itself, it promises to be both dramatic and unforgettable.


FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT DOUG HOLDER at ibbetsonpress@msn.com or (617) 710-0163

Headstone: October 27, 1915 to August 30, 1984 bY Brian James

Headstone:
October 27, 1915 to August 30, 1984

Review by Alice Weiss

Brian James’ account of his relationship with his “non-traditional” father bills itself as part truth, part fiction. Which is truth and which is fiction? The bare facts of the father’s life are: he was short, earned his living at a job where he worked the midnight to eight shift (that shift, it seems, so he could pretend not to have a job when he hung out at Drake’s Bar from 8 AM to 3 P.M. every day). He had a wife, one son, Brian, died at the age of 68, drank vodka, worked just enough hours to support his family and his drinking and gambling habit.

What may well be fiction, or put together from the stories his father or his father’s friends told, is the most interesting part of the book. This is because James takes us into Drake’s Café, “a happiness hangout and conduit for anything except drugs,” and introduces us not only to his father, Junior, but to all his father’s buddies, their nicknames and their various activities. He tells us Junior who drinks “more vodka than Rasputin” typically comes out of work at 8:00 A.M. passes Spike, the bookie, and says ’give me the zero for twenty dollars, Soldier Boy in the Fourth at Rockingham and Cincinnati in the series for my limit.’ Spike without so much as breaking his stride says, You got it Junior.”

James describes the hourly doings of this cast of characters devoted to hanging out in the bar, but who seem to be also secretly working at their eight hours, five days a week jobs, among them, Dad, a night watchman, ‘Mickey Mantle’ half the municipal waste management crew, the big “O” a retired state police officer, Carrier Jack, the mailman. The guys form a community based on all the illicit activity they think is going on and they can pretend they are really a part of. There are two real numbers runners, Spike and Whirl-away but what the rest do is talk trash to each other in the way of 1940’s gangster movies, drink, and have tournament bouts of Name that Tune, oh yes, and fix one another’s cars.

This book is also fun because of the swagger that Brian James has when he talks about his father. There’s a Tom Sawyer scene where Junior gets Brian and all his buddies to paint the house (his mother is away) for a keg of beer. The neighborhood kids, James says, loved Junior, “the highlight of every visit by Tony, Rocco, Paulie, Cedge and Big Kid was an exit via Dad’s cellar gallery of stars. Dad would attach celebrity heads to generic centerfold torsos. Famous persons, the likes of Queen Elizabeth and Mamie Eisenhower, never looked so good as in his collage.” You can feel the rhythm.

The thread that holds the book together, though, is that whatever else his father was he dearly loved his son and his son grew up feeling loved by his father. In one of the last short chapters (and they are all very short) Brian is grown up and working as a law enforcement officer, and discovers that the names of two of the Drakes Café characters, Hughie and Las, appear up in the evidence of one of Brian’s criminal cases. He fears his father might be involved in some way, so he tells him what’s going on. It’s an interesting account because you know he is risking a great deal in exposing his investigation to Junior. Junior brushes him off, tells him not to worry, but what becomes clear to the reader, if not to James himself is that Junior has never really been involved in any criminal endeavor, and, is embarrassed that he has to reveal that to his son, so he doesn’t quite. But you can see the tenderness and care.

All that being said, this is a book that could have really used an editor. The stories are fun but given the half jokey, back hand way Brain tells them, you have to go back and try to figure out what is going on and sometimes you just can’t. At times I got very confused as to what was happening when. This guy has great material. It could have been told much more clearly.

Ibbetson Street Press to release new poetry collection "Choir of Day" by Robert K. Johnson

"Choir of the Day" a new poetry collection by Robert K. Johnson, (a long time poetry editor of the Ibbetson Street Press) will be released
this October (2011).


***** To preorder send a check or money order for $16 to Ibbetson Street Press 25 School St. Somerville, Mass. 02143

"Robert Johnson writes poems I wish I had written

and read — again and again. He’s a real underground

American poet with a strong, mature poetic voice

in the tradition of writers with a commitment to

a realistic, honest life experience. Forget The New

Yorker, The American Poetry Review, books from

Copper Canyon or Graywolf Press. Finding Robert

Johnson is hard work, but it’s worth the effort. — Sam

Cornish." (Boston’s first Poet Laureate)



"Robert K. Johnson’s poems read like little stories. This

collection of beautifully written poems captivates,

seduces, and transports the reader on a journey of a

life traveled. I was deeply moved by these poems." —

Gloria Mindock, Cervena Barva Press

Out of the Woods into the Sun by Guy R. Beining

Out of the Woods
into the Sun
Guy R. Beining
Kamini Press 201
ISBN 978-91-977437-6-1
order@kaminipress.com


“New eyes are needed”

My initial impression: the Kamini Press has done it again. The
reproductions in color and the laid paper are fine selections again.
This small chap book is a gem, again.

Beinings art work combines figurative, narrative and metaphor,
“memory is a branch” and the immediacy in the painting strokes
depicts an abstract sensibility, as well as, the gestural drawing offers
an expressive attitude. Viewers will find a painting on every page,
with a poetic sentence below. “the shoreline pretends to be an ointment.”
The juxtapositions are immaculate; poetry and painting works in this
book because the words redirect the reader back into the paintings
and the tension between the images and the words draw us into
the presence on the page.

I highly recommend this book for those who love art and writing.

Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor:
Wilderness House Literary Review
Reviewer:
Ibbetson Street Press

Endicott College/Ibbetson Street Press Visiting Author Series: Every Broom and Bridget with Tom Daley

Endicott College/Ibbetson Street Press Visiting Author Series is presenting a one man play by Tom Daley that views the 19th Century American poet Emily Dickinson through the eyes of her Irish servant Tom Kelley titled: "Every Broom and Bridget." The series is directed by Professor Doug Holder.

Thursday Sept 29th 3:30PM Tia's Theatre Center for the Arts Endicott College 376 Hale St. Beverly, Mass.

Reflecting the prejudice of much of the Yankee upper crust towards Irish Catholic immigrants in America, as a young woman, the poet Emily Dickinson recommended to her brother (and half-seriously) that he kill some of the Irish boys he was teaching in Boston (“There are so many now, there is no room for the Americans”). However, later in life, she entrusted her poems to a beloved Irish housekeeper, Margaret Maher, who kept them in a trunk in the Dickinsons’ attic (and who refused to follow Emily Dickinson’s instructions and burn them after Dickinson’s death).

Every Broom and Bridget—Emily Dickinson and Her Servants, a play by poet and educator Tom Daley, dramatizes these contradictions. The play is narrated by the character Tom Kelley, an Irish-born Dickinson family groundskeeper whom Emily Dickinson appointed her chief pallbearer. The play weaves poems and letter excerpts by Dickinson together with excerpts from communications from the Dickinsons’ Irish housekeeper, Margaret Maher; Emily Dickinson’s friend and posthumous editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson; and others to elucidate a relationship imagined to include affection, condescension, and resentment between the poet and the people who served her well-to-do family.

The poet and her servants are all “channeled” through the voice of pallbearer Kelley, who is haunted in later life by a vision of the day of “Miss Emily”’s funeral. Using minimal costume changes and different accents, Daley (as Tom Kelley) re-creates events, real and invented, surrounding the burial of the poet who “could not stop for Death.”



Tom Daley is a member of the faculty of the Online School of Poetry (http://onlineschoolofpoetry.org/index.html) and has served on the tutorial faculty of Walnut Hill School for the Arts. Tom’s poetry has been published in numerous journals, including Harvard Review, Fence, Prairie Schooner, Barrow Street, Poetry Ireland Review, and has been anthologized in Hacks: The Grub Street Anthology, the Bagel Bards Anthology, and Poets for Haiti. He graduated with highest honors in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina, where he won the Charles and Fanny Fay Wood Academy of American Poets Prize.

Excerpt from the play:

Tom Kelley, Emily Dickinson’s Chief Pallbearer, Muses over Her Memory the Night after Her Funeral.
by Tom Daley

Ah, Miss Emily! There’s no lamplight
burning your windowpanes this evening.
There’ll be nothing burning ever again
for me in this place. How many nights have I run
here from my watchman’s rounds at the college
to keep a secret vigil under your windows
as the shadow of your pen feathered
its mysterious codes out to the Milky Way?

Just around the corner,
in your garden, is where we
committed our first confidences—
spring mornings when I helped
you dig rows for your flowers,
or brought you a load of manure.
Or in autumn, when we put
the beds to sleep, and you told me
of your squelched yearnings and how
sometimes that other world pierced
you clear through, like the tines
of a pitchfork.

That’s where we had our short laughs
about the long lunacies
of men and women. And that’s where
I told you of my terrible feeling
that I was only a tenant
in the garret of my own heart.

There was never a woman to talk
to like you, not Maggie, or my
wife Mary, concerned as they were
with their travails, worrying over
children sick or dying,
or constantly maneuvering
the negotiations over
housekeeping out of deadlock.

But you had your distractions, too,
and after all, you were the daughter
of a Protestant squire—only
occasionally and then discreetly aware
of the constant and fervent attention
of your Catholic serf.

You and your people never had to sing
for your supper like the fishmongering
Molly Malone; you never wheeled
anything like a barrow up a street
or down a lane. And, yet, I know you
lugged a magnificent burden
all the same.

Miss Emily, I’d ask God to grant you eternal
rest—but I somehow I know your unquiet soul
will be having none of it.
I remember overhearing you say
that at school there was always
a clock—and always a regiment of girls
gripping their hymnals and standing at stiff
and compliant attention. I’ll wager my right
arm you turned on the sour heel
of your theology and stared them all down.
That’s my girl!

Lord, if the apostate Emily Dickinson
refuses your gift of everlasting peace, may
perpetual light shine upon her all the same.
She was a trinity of illumination to me:
Whale oil, lamp wick, and above all, flame.
I curse my fate for having lived
long enough to see you snuff it all away!

from Every Broom and Bridget, a play about Emily Dickinson and her Irish servants
by Tom Daley

Part of this address was originally published as a poem, “To Emily Dickinson,” in Alehouse Review


*** A highlight of the Oxford University roundtable was daley's performance of Tom Kelley's elegiac address to the deceased poet as he gazes up at her bedroom window.... the audience was powerfully moved--some to tears." -- Jonnie Guerra, past president of the Emily Dickinson International Society

To Hugh Fox by Lo Galluccio

( Lo Galluccio and Hugh Fox at The Somerville News Writers Festival)









small epiphanies you take me into your secrets

I'll take you into mine, rigid white sprouts of rich

decay....Inside fuchsia, the world streams, monkeys

across the stone faces of god.”

****Hugh as Connie Fox from Blood Cocoon


There we are cheeks pressed against

each other --- your round baby face

and blue eyes crowned by a cap and

me blowing a pink kiss with fake fur

thrown over shoulders. November

and you read at the Somerville News

Writer's Festival about your grandson.

You and I have been affectionate pals

ever since you called me a vampira

from reading my first chapbook

“Hot Rain.”


I think back on all of your work I

have devoured and reviewed with such

pleasure, always amazed at your cosmic

wonderment and lush and clashing

details of earthling

activites. You were enamored of feminine beauty

and dared to become a woman

yourself with lacy tights and lovers. You even

gave her a poetic voice.


We traded music and reviewed each others'

styles....your cat-like playing on the piano,

lifting from each composer the swatches

of genius you wanted to invoke, and then

you writing up my “Spell on You” and

naming me a new Marlene Dietrich for the

velvely smoothness you generously heard

in my voice.

You investigated traces of the ancient

gods, a unique authority on pre-Columbian

American cultures and the green unity

of all things.

Ganesha, Moloch, the Buddha, Yama –

your fascination with the gods sparked

thunder in your verse. You were never

afraid to reach up and outward to over-

turned stars. In “Way way

off the road” your most authentic travelogue

memoir you recounted the “Hippy, Post-

Beat, Flower-Children, Invisible Generation,”

of which you were a member.

In “Defiance” – the book with the howling

fox on the cover you wrote:


“I was more beautiful than Beauty herself,

but more beast than the beasts in the forest,

far from my friends, the poetry that a bird

that never comes to sing in my brain, seventy-four

years of Bach, Holst, The Little Girl

with Honey Hair, now clouds, everything clouds,

and when there aren't any more, the hand of Nothing

touches my shoulder,

“It's time to

become a cloud.”


You are a cloud In Michigan and a star

in Paris and a mountain in the Andes

and a red flower in Brazil.

I remember you with the pigeons around

us at Au Bon Pan in Harvard Square –

you always scribbling poetry and

conversing with strangers to make

them friends. I am grateful the

suffering is over and know that you

dreamed into your death like an oracle.


You are forever in our hearts.


Lo Galluccio

Hugh Fox: Way, Way Off On His Final Road: 1932 to 2011

Hugh Fox: Way, Way Off On His Final Road
By Doug Holder








*From the introduction of “ Way, Way Off the Road: The Memoirs of The Invisible Man” by Hugh Fox (Ibbetson Street Press)

Several years ago the Ibbetson Street Press published a Hugh Fox poetry collection “Angel of Death.” I had never actually met Fox in the flesh, but I was aware of his substantial contributions to the small press over the past 40 years. Fox was a founding member of COSMEP, (a seminal small press organization), a founding member of the PUSHCART PRIZE, and edited the groundbreaking anthology “ The Living Underground,” to name just a few achievements.

One day, in my apartment on Ibbetson Street in Somerville, Mass. I was just about asleep when I heard my doorbell ring. I went to answer it and a man of a certain age, with long gray hair spouting from the sides of his cap and a heavy Bronx accent said: “ Hi Doug, what do ya’ have in there a Blonde?’ I said: “Well my wife is here, she’s sort of blondish.” I asked him in but I guess he sensed I was in no condition for company. He declined and promptly took a cab back to his hotel.

Since then I have had the opportunity to meet him on a couple of occasions. Fox is full of anecdotes about many of the stumble bums, poets, poseurs, publishers, editors, with all their infinite variety, on the small press scene. I am glad this manuscript has seen the light of day. And when you read it hopefully you will see the light too.

--Doug Holder (2006)

I don’t remember when I first became aware of Hugh Fox. He was a prolific writer across all genres. It might have been through one of the many reviews he wrote for the Small Press Review; it might be from the manuscripts he sent me to publish, or through the many poets of the “Invisible Generation” ( A term he used to describe his peer group of writers) he befriended over the years. Whatever you say about Fox, he wasn’t a cliche of a man—he was a total original. He was a PhD with a big disdain for the academy; his breadth of knowledge left me breathless; he could be incredibly kind and incredibly rude, but I loved him warts and all—-hey ain’t that what love is after all?

I asked Fox a few years ago what he would like to be remembered for. He told me: "That I reminded people to take a close look and engage the world around them.”Fox took it all in: from sex, the Aztecs, religion, the meaning of being, the meaning of meaning…you name it.

He was a firm believer in the small press—not the New York publishing houses where the buck is the bottom line. It was his religion, his passion, to review the thousands of small press books of all genres for the late Len Fulton’s Small Press Review, and other publications. To Hugh, the chap, or the big tome was all high holy. Nothing was too obscure, too raw. He called many a writer a “genius,” but what I think what he really was trying to say was he recognized the genius in all of us.

He took many a writer under his wing. He could be unapologetically flirtatious but more often that not he would charm the pants off you—and in his younger days I am sure he literally did. Hugh had a huge cadre of writers that were the objects of his affection.

He introduced me and countless others to the short form or capsule book review. In one of his short reviews he could really get to the core of the book with an economy of words, and he nixed the deadening academic jargon that could bleed the life out of any writing.

I would get unexpected calls late at night from Fox. He would say: “ Hey I miss you pal—why haven’t you called?” When I was laid off of my job of many years he offered to put me and my wife up at his home in Lansing, Michigan; he lobbied for me to be included in the important avant-garde poetry anthology “ Inside the Outside.” Fox told me he loved me more than once… and you know what?... I truly think he did.

I thought that Fox would never die. He told me for years he was on his last legs with cancer, and his time was short. He even wrote a play that concerned him and the noted small press poet Lo Galluccio, meeting cute while in the throes of ovarian and prostate cancer. To my knowledge Galluccio has never suffered from ovarian cancer, but she was a dear friend of Fox and he included a lot of us in his work.

As Samuel Beckett wrote: “ We are born astride the grave,” and Fox is gone. He died in a hospice in Michigan at 79, heavily sedated, out of pain finally, drifting up into the ether in a dream—to the cosmos—to that grand poem—infinity.

Legendary Small Press Activist, Poet, Critic, Reviewer Hugh Fox dies at age 79.

I got word from Hugh Fox's family that he passed Sunday, Sept. 4th in a hospice in Michigan. Fox was a iconic figure in the Small Press--for another interview I conducted with him on litkicks go to http://www.litkicks.com/HughFox

"Poet and Polymath Hugh Fox"

I am reprinting an interview I did with Hugh Fox in 2008 that appeared in Reconfigurations magazine and " From the Paris of New England..."
Hugh Fox is in an hospice now, and is in the final stages of his battle with cancer.

"Poet and Polymath Hugh Fox"
Interview with Doug Holder

Poet and Polymath Hugh Fox: Still a Wunderkind at 76

At the Sherman Café in Union Square (Somerville, Mass.) I met poet, translator, critic, playwright, Hugh Fox and his wife, before a taping we were to do at Somerville Community Access TV of my show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.” Fox was visiting his daughter who lives in Somerville and teaches at area universities. Two of my next-door neighbors Kirk and Lucy Etherton joined us as Fox held court. At age 76 Fox shows no signs of slowing down. He regaled us with stories of his extensive travels, all peppered with his vast wealth of knowledge of ancient Aztec culture, mythology, literature, and publishing. Fox talks like a Bronx cabdriver (decidedly from the side-of-his mouth), and he is not afraid to use, to put it mildly, unsavory language. My friend described him as “Larger than life.” And so he is.

Fox, who was a tenured professor at the Michigan State for well over 30 years, recently completed a controversial memoir “Way, Way Off the Road” (Ibbetson Street) that dealt with many of the figures from the small press movement, a movement that has produced thousands of small literary magazines and books, and is the lifeblood of poets and writers of all stripes.

Small Press books and magazines are typically defined as having press runs of less than 5,000. Fox has championed a movement that gave a start from everyone from Allen Ginsberg to Mark Doty.

Fox was a founding member of COSMEP, (a seminal small press organization), and he published the well-regarded literary magazine “Ghost Dance: The International Quarterly of Experimental Poetry,” (1968-1995). He is the recipient of two Fulbright Professorships and penned the first critical study of the dirty old man of literature himself, Charles Bukowski, as well as a critical study of the poet Lyn Lifshin. Fox was a founding editor of the Pushcart Prize, has written and published over 80 books and chapbooks of poetry, and has reviewed countless small press books for Len Fulton’s “Small Press Review.” Fox was the Latin American editor of the Western World Review & North American Review, and a former contributing reviewer on Smith/Pulpsmith magazine founded by Harry Smith.

* * *

Doug Holder: Hugh you wrote critical studies of Henry James and Charles Bukowski, two vastly different writers. Whom did you have the greater affinity for?

Hugh Fox: I got my PhD from the University of Illinois and my dissertation was on Edgar Allen Poe. I was raised as an Irish Catholic, and all I read was Irish Catholic literature. I had no idea what was in the outside world. I decided to take on Henry James because it would be an Americanization process and I thought I would learn to write novels. I did like James’ work a lot.

I never intended to get involved with Bukowski. I was totally academic. And then one day I was in this bookstore in Hollywood, the “Pickwick.” Anyway, I bought Bukowski’s book: “Crucifix and the Death Hand.” I got a hold of his press LouJon in New Orleans, and they told me to look him up in the phonebook. So I called him up and said: “This is Hugh Fox. I love your work. I want to meet you.” He said: “OK, come over tomorrow.” He was living in a motel in Hollywood. I talked with him a while. He took out these suitcases and there were all his books and magazines in them. He gave me five full suitcases and told me if I saw doubles to keep them. My entire way of seeing the world changed after this. Bukowski and Henry Miller were big influences of change for me.

DH: You were friends with Harry Smith, the book publisher, and founder of “The Smith…” magazine. Smith published such writers as: Duane Locke, Ruth Moon Kempher, John Bennett, Lloyd Van Brunt, Jeff Sorensen, Alan Britt, and Tristram Smith as well as my friends Luke Salisbury and Jared Smith. Can you talk about your relationship with Smith?

HF: I’ll tell you what happened. Smith had no money at all, and he meets Marian Pechak up in Rhode Island at Brown. So he marries her and her parents died and she got millions. So they move to Brooklyn Heights. They had a big Brownstone mansion. So Smith tells her he wants to be a publisher. His wife said:” Hey, we have the money do what you want to do”. So he started to publish. He had an office right by City Hall in New York City. I met Smith through COSMEP and used to go to Smith’s all the time. I went between semesters, and in the summer. I’d go for a month a year for twenty years. Smith published everyone who was anyone. I did a lot of reviews for him. He paid me—I stayed at his house—he set up the basement for me. We used to go out for lunch and dinner and his wife told the kids to call me: “Uncle Hugh.” I was closer to Smith than anyone else. Through him I met Menke Katz who was a great Yiddish writer.

DH: You edited the groundbreaking anthology “The Living Underground,” that our Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish was in. How did you get this collection together?

HF: It was formed due to my connection with COSMEP. This was the “Committee of Small Press Editors and Publishers.” Len Fulton and others formed it in the early 70’s. Len Fulton still runs the magazine “The Small Press Review” and “Dustbooks Publishing” in Paradise, California. COSMEP used to have annual conventions around the country: St. Paul, New York, and New Orleans. Every convention had a huge reading and almost every small press editor in the country was there. I got to meet all the writers and all the publishers and I got to know people in Boston, and of course Sam Cornish was in Boston, and as it happened he was included in “The Living Underground…” Cornish was at the convention in Boston.

DH: What is an “underground poet?”

HF: Someone who is not published by the big New York publishers.

DH: What was “groundbreaking” about the anthology?

HF: We had living, contemporary small press poets. We had folks like Charles Potts, Richard Krech, and many others. We had a reunion almost forty years later in Berkley, Ca.

DH: How did you get involved with the small press literary award the “Pushcart Prize?”

HF: I got involved through a COSMEP conference in New Orleans. The Prize doesn’t have as much impact as it did in the day. I go to a Barnes and Noble today and nobody is buying anything, everyone is there with his or her computer. Everyone is having coffee with his or her computers.

DH: Hugh you are the most prolific reviewer I know. How did you get involved with reviewing books, and why do you spend so much time on an activity that doesn’t provide you with monetary compensation?

HF: I became good friends with Len Fulton of the Small Press Review. Now, every four months or so I get a package of books to read. It’s good for me because I get to find out what’s going on with the poets. It influences my style—all these poets I read. It helps me get my name in the Small Press Review all the time. I want to be involved.

DH: Your are the doyen of the short review. How are you able to get to the essence of a book with such few words?

HF: Before I go to bed I always read a few things. Then I just react to it. It’s funny it is like I listen to an inner voice. The inner voice tells me what to write. The reason I got a degree in American Literature was really to learn how to write reviews of books. To react to books. My first draft of my Poe dissertation was horrible. My advisor said as much. He told me that I was going to write his way. He said: “You are going to react, feel, and so forth. I learned to react. I learned this from academic teaching.”

DH: You said you always considered yourself a wunderkind, a boy genius. How about now at 76?

HF: The same at 76. I haven’t aged mentally or psychologically. I’m still 26. I may have cancer of the prostate, arthritis, but my mind is the same. When I was in California recently I wrote 100 poems in two weeks.

DH: What do you want your legacy to be?

HF: I haven’t thought about it. I would like to see other people do the same thing. I want them to react to the world around them.

Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish’s ‘dead beats’: The magic of joining words

Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish’s ‘dead beats’:
The magic of joining words

by Michael T. Steffen

Words set together, that’s all poetry needs. Sam Cornish finds just two words, the title,‘dead beats’, to magnetize and entertain our attention, evoking foremost, for readers of poetry,the Beat poets of the 1950s and 60s, notably Ginsberg and Kerouac (and Marlon Brando and Thomas Wolfe!) whom Cornish visits in poems throughout the book.

But look back at that first word, ‘dead’. For poetry that loves paradox, reversals, contrariness, surprises, over- and understatements and everything turned around and on its head, the word ‘dead’ hints at something terribly vital. For poetry it does. Ever since David Ferry—hold on a second!—ever since Gilgamesh, Odysseus and Aeneas, long before Dante and Hamlet and Ezra Pound and Robert Pinsky, poetry has been sourcing from talks with and about the dead. Maybe the way all life does. Only poetry comes right out and says so.


Put the two words together, presto of the true ring of a commonplace term, and the next time you’re called a “dead beat” (poets and readers of poetry often disguise themselves as such to the perception of this agitated worldly world) have Sam Cornish’s book in your pocket and share the secret compliment with your smile. (“Beat,” also, is the word partner of “heart,” with which Cornish’s writing is always in rhythm.)

I wanted to walk readers to the front door of this book, not through the house. Yet here’s a peak at the poem, in astonishing phrases, ‘Getting a Life’ dedicated to Robert Creely:

the truth

on the floor
like scenes cut

from a movie
you miss them

there is nothing
to hold the

poem together
but his breath…

So Cornish’s magical ‘dead beats’ published by Ibbetson Street Press, those two words, the title wagging the dog (would poetry have it any other way?) held the book together and resonated from poem to poem as I read with relish.


‘dead beats’ by Sam Cornish
is available for $16 from
Ibbetson Street Press
25 School Street
Somerville, MA 02143


To order online go to http://lulu.com/ibbetsonpress

Somerville Writer Tracy Strauss: Gets By With A Little Help Of Her Cat

Somerville Writer Tracy Strauss: Gets By With A Little Help Of Her Cat

By Doug Holder

Even though Tracy Strauss no longer technically lives in Somerville, (she is just over the border in the Republic of Cambridge); she is at heart a Somerville writer. She is an accessible woman with an open face and no discernible literary affectations. She lived in the 'Ville for 5 years, won a Somerville Arts Council fellowship for her poetry, and she continues to pound the keys of her laptop at the Diesel Cafe in Davis Square. Her work has appeared in the LYRICAL SOMERVILLE in the The Somerville News, as well as Somerville's independent literary journal IBBETSON STREET. In regard to her use of the Diesel as a writer's retreat of sorts she told me for some reason the din of the cafe helps her writing, " Chris Castellani, the director of GRUB STREET in Boston writes there all the time too. Maybe it is something about the atmosphere in which all these writers are present writing and creating throughout the cafe. It spurs us on I guess," she said.

Strauss, who recently completed a 5 year teaching stint at Emerson College in Boston will be teaching Writing at the New England Conservatory this fall. She is an accomplished writer and has been published in such journal as Solstice, Briar Cliff Review and Drunken Boat, to name just a few. Strauss had a residency at the prestigious writers' colony BREAD LOAF as well at the NORMAN MAILER WRITER'S COLONY, and is currently working with the best selling literary agent Kent D. Wolf of Global Literary who is shopping her memoir: HANNAH GRACE: HOPE, HEALING & A RESCUE CAT that involves healing from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome with her real life rescue cat Hannah.

Strauss has been the victim of sexual abuse when she was much younger and a cat she brought home helped her heal. Strauss said: " Hannah had been traumatized in her past as well and was afraid of people. I was afraid of animals, especially dogs, so we both dealt with our issues through our relationship. "

I asked Strauss how hard was it for her to get an agent. As you would expect it ain't easy. She said: " I sent out 100 query letters. I networked at writers' conferences, I networked on Twitter, and on my blog. At one point I met Kaylie Jones (the daughter of James Jones " From Here to Eternity") and she helped me get the manuscript in shape to be marketed."

Although Strauss is concentrating on memoir writing she loves writing poetry. She finds it a great way to express herself. "It is a foundation for my prose," she reflected. "Poetry has a musicality to it and so should all writing to some extent."

Like many Somerville area writers Strauss is a hustler: teaching, writing, giving readings, her fingers dancing on the keyboard at the Diesel, and loving every minute of love it. I always say if you have passion for what you do--you are living a charmed life indeed.







From Here



I am able

to overlook



the track

where the



people run

in circles as



I have done so

many times



now



I rest, I breathe deeply

aware my knees have unshut



I sit on the

metal bleachers



high above

freed



for a moment my eyes

my mind transcends



I look out



beyond the rooted trees,

the American flag half-staff



tied to its hard silver pole

the chaotic city, my life’s upset



all so distant, all so close

my fingers fit between



each other, my knuckles

spread, I am able to



bend without breaking

my tightened frightened



cramped hands, open myself

as much as is possible



to this world given my body

and spirit’s painful past



my elbows slowly, shyly

show their pale, naked selves



my arms stretch forward, up

I reach for the sky –



the clouds are like closed eyelids

the lashes spilling streaks of light.


--
trace elements # 52 & # 830:
----------------------------------
"By associating with a cat, one only risks becoming richer." - Colette

"Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened."
- Anatole France


http://thehannahgracebook.wordpress.com/

Review of AGING HEAD IN THE CLOUDS, chapbook by Alan Holder

Review of AGING HEAD IN THE CLOUDS, chapbook by Alan Holder, Finishing Line Press, PO Box 1626, Georgetown, Kentucky 40324, 27 pages, 2010

Review by Barbara Bialick

“Aging Head in the Clouds” is an “I can’t believe this is me” little book about aging on into your 70s by a long-time academic professor and writer. However, there is little that is academic in the book, which has the incredulous theme that he himself really has to grow old and die, just as his parents did before him. He goes to the hospital, the cemetery, and to his own private space to come to terms with this most human predicament.

The book starts right out on theme: “Jesus! Who is that geezer?” he exclaims in the first poem, “On Being Shown a Recent Photo of Myself”. “It’s bad enough having to view/the daily man in the mirror/…did I need to look at this cruel product/of a camera apparently featuring/a fast-forward gizmo,/did I need to take this appalling peek/into my future?”

But as the saying goes, “the future is now” so being a poet, he put together this chapbook about aging. It’s a quick read and does not get bogged down with symbolism. Yet by the end, I did think, to myself, Oh no will this be me, too?

In the poem, “Dead Parents”, he quotes Satchel Paige, who said “Don’t look back. Something may be gaining on you.” He replies, “Don’t look forward either,/for you are surely gaining on them…/just by taking a walk, watching TV,/brushing your teeth/…just by breathing, for God’s sake.” He points out that at age 77, he’s already ten years older than his father was. “Will my dead parents know my face/if they see me in heaven?”

He paints a natural yet basic impression of watching himself grow old and born to die… But while he has a good, readable style and voice, he has apparently let go of all that academic language he most certainly must have used in his past. Because this is it!

Born in Brooklyn, New York, he got a doctorate at Columbia University. He taught for 40 years at a number of colleges and universities, including Hunter College of the City University of New York. He also taught at Columbia, University of Vermont, University of Southern California, and Williams College. At present he teaches an adult-ed course on poetry in the Ridgefield, CT public library. He published four books of literary criticism, and other works of nonfiction and poetry in a number of journals. Finishing House, his publisher, also published another chapbook, “Opened: A Mourning Sequence”. He currently lives in Westchester County, New York.

Improbable Music: Poems by Sandra Kohler

Improbable Music
Poems by Sandra Kohler
Word Press
Cincinnati OH
Copyright © 2011 by Sandra Kohler
ISBN: 9781936370368
Softbound, 114 pages, no price listed


Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Sandra Kohler is an interesting poet for her dreams, which occur with regularity in this book, perhaps explained in the poem “Alpe di Lune.” In v. she reveals “The buildings of childhood live in us,/recur, unchanged, in our dreams.”

Indeed there are recurring dreams throughout this book dreams and realities of death, loss, the violence of war and its resulting deaths, roads of loneliness and failure that do not reach dead ends but continue on through life.

In fact when Ms. Kohler sticks to these themes her poetry seems strong and reality based despite the crutch of dreams. However, when she wanders from her emotional roads into the highways of religion and politics, she will lose all but the most ardent reader and everyone who does not agree with her views on these two subjects that a fraught with failure for one who does not handle them carefully, perhaps delicately, perhaps with more thought for the ones she seems to criticize and the reasoning behind greater things in life
(and death) than she seems to grasp.

Perhaps, as the ending of “The Cup” her poems are written with “The cup of ego, the cup of emptiness.” And, frankly, if you are not prepared it may weigh you down. However, if you like this kind of poetry – and apparently there are many who do – you may really get into this book and find in it, if not joy, perhaps some truths.

Athletes by Kirby Congdon.

Congdon, Kirby. Athletes. Rockford, MI: Presa Press, 2011. Print.




Review by Emily Braile

Kirby Congdon chose an ambitious theme for his short volume of poetry, Athletes. As indicated by the title, most of the poems Congdon has compiled are about athletes and athletics. However, he deviates from this theme in several poems to explore comic book characters and motorcyclists, leaving the volume feeling a bit disjointed and unfocused. His poetry also lacks a subtlety and refinement common to sophisticated poetry, evident in lines such as:

Their leather torsos,
riding iron bulls,
intimate and crouched,
intense in the lover’s act,
copulate with their hot machines.
Blood and oil are one.
They eat and digest
death (Motorcyclist 21).

Perhaps Congdon intended to use such raw language to reflect the raw nature he sees in the athletic world. I understand and appreciate the rugged, even primitive energy of athletics, but I also see a grace and power in sports that I find myself wishing was reflected in Congdon’s writing. At the end of the volume, I’m left unsatisfied, wanting something more, or maybe less.
Within Congdon’s poems are ideas that, again, are ambitious, but could be clearer. The poem “Swimmers” opens with the lines:

Before their oceans,
swimmers inhale,
select their wave
and, charging, dive.

The beginning is straightforward, but then becomes a bit ambiguous in lines five to seven:

The liquid birth
rehearses in reverse
that of death’s flat curse.

Thematic clarity and consistency are aspects generally missing in Athletes. For instance, the poem “Figure” seems to explore the theme of death rather than athletics, comic book characters, or motorcyclists. Congdon again displays a lack of subtlety in lines such as:

His firm figure
is erect
and from that phallic silhouette
the language flows,
free and fertile as a brook…

The poem ends with:

Death does not come to us;
soon or late,
men ready
their manliness
for that final state,
and, walking,
steady and direct,
march straight on
into the end of it.

The idea that people reach a point where they, knowing it’s their time, go to “Death,” rather than have “Death” come to them, is again an ambitious theme. However, the lines quoted above feel a bit over the top, most likely because of the phrase: “men ready/their manliness…” Lines like these, scattered liberally throughout Congdon’s writing, display a romanticized machismo unnecessary in elegant poetry. The lines quoted above illustrate such machismo and an aggressive sexuality, as do lines such as:

burn tire tracks
though my guts;
roar, exhausting,
under rearing buttocks;
cut corners
across my taut chest;
like roving lovers,
leave me, strapped,
silent and stranded (Motorcyclists 28).

And:

Hard helmets and high boots
tumescent in the sun,
got-up in rubber skin
and leather hide,
black, strapped, laced,
buckled with grommets,
chrome and brassy-eyed,
their dress itself is an act of sex… (Daredevil 29).

“Daredevil” is an interesting piece in that it clearly, and more gracefully than many of the others, expresses its theme. The poem is a comment on how men who ride motorcycles for sport entertain a higher chance of sudden, young death, but at least they die with their boots on, as opposed to people who spend their lives behind desks and doors, too afraid of death and pain to really live. The word selection and phrasing could be tighter, but this piece shows promise.


Athletes requires an overall tightening. The many poems that deviate from the stated theme of the collection hinder the effect I, as a reader, assumed Congdon wanted to communicate. The poetry is weakened by the way Congdon presents it with his over-the-top sexualized machismo and loose, unclear phrasing. I would encourage Congdon to write and publish more prose than poetry. He included one piece of prose, “The Speed Track,” opening it with the simple, clean, descriptive statement: “But we saved the machine.” Congdon’s one example of prose is more eloquent than his poetry and was, in the end, what I wanted more of.


**Emily Braile is an English major at Endicott College in Beverly, Mass. This is another in a series of book reviews by Endicott College students presented by the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene.

Love Song: playing at the Charlestown Working Theater

Love Song
playing at the Charlestown Working Theater
Presented by Orfeo Group


Reviewed by Amy R. Tighe

The brain, they say, is the organ most useful for sexual pleasure. But what is it in ourselves that calls us to even want connection or desire? What part of the brain tells us we want any kind of intercourse, whether it be social, sexual or spiritual?

Love Song is a terse, fitful and thoroughly enjoyable exploration of a man seeking and finding connection but the play begs the question: with whom?

Produced by Orfeo Group, a local and vibrant Boston-based nonprofit theater company, and playing at the Charlestown Working Theatre through August 27th, Love Song brings you to the edge where the only choice you have is to fall, in love.

Bean is an isolated man with some sort of psychological illness ( the playwright does not tell us which, exactly.) His extreme yuppie sister and her equally extreme husband try to help, tolerate and care for him with various degrees of success. One night a female burglar breaks into his dark room and catapults him on a search for connection.

The uber yuppie couple are wonderfully played by Daniel Berger-Jones and Liz Hayes. Harry is a dream, plying his wife with logic and at the same time, too much wine and Joan, his wife and Bean's sister, shows us that insanity can indeed run in families --it's just that some people are better making a living at it than others. Daniel Berger-Jones doubles as a waiter, and shows us a solid range in his performances. In one scene, Harry breaks down from his rapid fire responses to Joan's neediness and it's one of the better moments in the play--it's a real moment where you experience the beginning of a real falling.

Joan, played by Liz Hayes, has a more limited range. She is believable as a woman stuck on high maintenance and few nuances, and Hayes brings us into the character with humor, skill and ease.

Bean, the brother, is a very complex character and Gabriel Kuttner gives a wonderful performance urging us into the slow, steady and smart logic in Bean's very skewed thinking. Kuttner portrays the sanity and insanity of reaching out while living in a world that threatens you without logic. Molly, the angry and tortured burglar who invades Bean's home and mind, is intense and heated. Georgia Lyman invites you into a harsh character and shows her transformation flawlessly into a love puppy and then a warrior-like Muse, which allows us to hope that even we can find love. Lyman is stunning as a guide to the edge of love.

The acting is strong, the characters are clear and the troupe plays off each other with lemon sharp precision. John Kolvenbach's writing is bright, intelligent and speedy- no sleeping on this road or you will miss entire villages of conversation. The pacing is electric, which was fun for the first 2/3 of the play, but after that, I was getting burnt out. Bean's mental illness, played by a lamp and ceiling, was interesting at first, but by the third episode, was not impressive.

I loved the setting of the Charlestown Working Theatre for this performance. To get to my seat, I had to cross the stage-- talk about intercourse! The theatre itself is an old firehouse, and feels cozy inside a storm. The set design was crisp, and brought an immediate intimacy to the performance.

Orfeo's mission is to "thrill" and maybe I am not sure what that means. This was not a thrilling piece of work, to me-- it was solid, enjoyable, rich and ripe. I loved the message Orfeo sends as a company: Risher Reddick, director of Love Song, announced that every Thursday night was free ticket night, Fridays are "date nights", Saturdays are surprise nights and after Sunday performances, there is a BBQ. Orfeo as a company wants to "reduce the distance between people through shared experiences of audacious art." What I enjoyed most of all is a talented troupe taking on a primal quest and asking us to not be a witness, but to fall with them, into the journey of connection. Definitely go see it.


Love Song
written by John Kolvenback
directed by Risher Reddick
presented by Orfoe Group
at the Charletown Working Theatre
from August 4 to August 27, tix $20, some free tix available
call Ovation Tix at 866-811-4111
Thur, Fri, Sat 8 pm, Sun 2 pm.
www.orfeogroup.org
www.charlestwonworkingtheatre.org

Mostly Redneck by Rusty Barnes

Mostly Redneck
Rusty Barnes
978-1-934513-32-3

Reviewed by Timothy Gager

I’ve known Rusty Barnes for close to eight years and I previously have read every one of the stories found in Mostly Redneck. After absorbing the book cover to cover, my first reaction was how heavy the plots, the prose and the words were. Also, don’t let the title fool you, as rednecks are stereotypically viewed as unintelligent, Barnes is a word craftsman of the finest kind. Language, pace, place, conflict and plot are carefully considered within each story and I found myself comparing the author to writers such as Andre Dubus II and Raymond Carver, masters I respect greatly.

Story wise, if you can take a punch in the face and be able to brag about it, this is where it’s at. Teen pregnant lovers kill the fathers of their babies. People party and have sex in the woods. Scores are settled in complete beat downs. Women compete against each other for men and their own self-worth. Men want women that are unavailable or they hit the road and never come back, leaving others destroyed.

Two of the stories which stood out for me were “Rick’s Song”, where the main character, Jimmy starts a new life, one torn apart from a car accident, by taking a crappy job at a Chinese restaurant. The other story I loved was, “O, Saddam”, a fine satire, completely different than the rest of the book. (Note: The mostly in Mostly Redneck). Here, a tour guide in Boston becomes involved with Saddam Hussein, who is hiding out as a nut vendor. Barnes creates a brilliant display of humor and heaviness intertwined within the set up.

Mostly Redneck, packs a wallop and as mention full of excellent writing. The denseness of subject matter was in stark contrast to the physical length of the book (153 pages) and the smallness of the font which were both, in my opinion, too small.

Sept 13, 2011: Newton Free Library Poetry Series--Mnookin, Mazur, Triedman, Helfgott-Hyett

(Click on Poster to Enlarge)

http://newtonfreelibraypoetryseries.blogspot.com


Newton Free Library 330 Homer Street Newton, Mass Poets of "Poets for Haiti" anthology to read..... Host: Doug Holder

Spared: Poems by Angie Ellis

Spared
Poems by Angele Ellis

Main Street Rag
Charlotte NC
Copyright © 2011 by Angele Ellis
ISBN: 978-1-59948-277-4
Softbound, 39 pages, $10

Review by Zvi A. Sesling


Ms. Ellis’s volume of poetry may be slim, but it is packed with punches from the opening poem “Mauches,” a polemic on ethnic prejudice that burns into any immigrant group which has contended with what Ms. Ellis experienced as a young girl. The same prejudice that exists today from liberal Massachusetts to gun-totin’ Arizona – being different or yourself does not conform to the norm.

In “Spared” good is bad, bad is good, escape (being spared) can turn nasty, can remind one of another person, while “On The Corniche, Beirut” shows the heartbreak of war,or civil war, how death comes up suddenly, how it never ends and leaves “the hole in the heart of the afternoon.”

Spared can also mean the reader is spared superfluous words, unneeded similes, unnecessary metaphors. Can it also mean being spared excess explanation or over dramatic verbiage resulting in a hollow ache inside.

While we are spared a lot in the relatively short poems, there is the feeling we would like to know more, but with good taste she lets us know in “World Of Glass” When language runs clear,/no explanation is desired.

About midway through the book you will find “Strike Sparks” an erotic homage to sex, to a lover any male would want to be, to be in that place of hot jungle love and sex, or is it all failure, all imagined, all hope or all true? Ah, Ms. Ellis can light the fire and our imagination does not want to put it out. Does she? Grab this small volume as you might her and hang on.

Somerville’s Allegra Martin: part of an ‘Anthology’ of singers.

Somerville’s Allegra Martin: part of an ‘Anthology’ of singers.

By Doug Holder

The scene—a middle-aged community newspaper journalist—the Sherman Café in Union Square--one delectable oatmeal scone… a paper cup of strong coffee to wash it down, and add one mezzo-soprano—Allegra Martin. All but the last item I was familiar with. Allegra Martin, who joined me for a morning repast and an interview is a Winter Hill resident and a member of the singing group “Anthology.” According to the website of the group it consists of “… a professional quartet of enchanting women’s voices. Their expansive variety of music is presented with the fine polish of classical training and an effervescent whimsy that arises from an enthusiasm for all styles of performance.”

Martin met at one of my favorite haunts to discuss her group and their music. Anthology consists of: Vicky Reichert, who is a soprano, Anney Gilotte a soprano, and Michelle Vachon, a mezzo-soprano, and Martin, a mezzo-soprano. All four of these accomplished singers live in Somerville.

Martin, a native of Lexington, Mass. told me that she naturally gravitated to Somerville. She smiled: “It’s a great town. Not too expensive. There are many of my peers here--fellow geeks, musicians, and a strong geek culture that includes gaming, sci-fi groups that feed their obsessions at the Diesel Café in Davis Square.” (Where Martin stops by now and then), she said.

“Anthology” is a cappella group so they do their stuff without musical accompaniment. Their range is impressive; they cover the waterfront of hot jazz, classical, renaissance polyphony, world folk traditions, and incorporate the works of contemporary local Boston composers. Martin listed Erin Huelkskamd and Michael Veloso as a couple of local composers the group admires.

Martin, like many Somerville artists works several jobs to keep her going. One that caught my interest was her work with the Urban Voices Program. This program was started by the Met Opera in New York City—and it has spread to Boston. It serves schools that don’t have a music program. Martin goes to the Mission Hill/Roxbury School in Boston and teaches kids K to 5.

Martin, who got her undergraduate degree from Williams College in Physics and Music, thought about engineering at one point but realized music was her primary interest. She teaches at Lassell College in Newton, Mass—where she hopes to grow a seminal music program.

The other members of this band of musicians and friends work as voice teachers, choral directors, and other gigs to keep in their field.

Allegra Martin is a hustler, and has to worry about the next gig, the monthly health insurance payment—you name it. But she is hopeful, and with good reason, that things will move to a more stable lifestyle, and she will be able to follow her passion in the years to come.





For more information go to: http://anthologyvoices.com