The Measure of Small Gratitudes by Ann Menebroker

The Measure of Small Gratitudes
ann Menebroker
Kamini Press 2011
ISBN 978-91-977437-7-8
order@kaminipress.com


"i'm old style, honey
wax paper wrapped sandwiches
and odd smelling lunch boxes
with handles, a thermos
with o.j. and gin, a banged-up
old portable radio once belonging
to an aunt of mine, playing songs
from the thirties and me, lighting
a cigarette from the matchbox
my mom got from "windows on the world"
when she flew to new york, alone
telling her children we didn't spend
much time with her, had dinner
at the world trade center and got
a little drunk at age seventy-nine."

Menebroker takes the small experiences that life offer so freely
and without any cost, she makes a poem that resonates universally:

"illness is such a distraction, so he puts
headphones on and listens to music
which is also a way to get to go other places.
his dentist has offered it as well as his
surgeon. when he takes the one he loves
into his arms there is music, but also
through its osmosis, a giving back
of the delectable and perceived beat
and the measure of small gratitudes."

Kamini Press has given us the reader another small gem, chapbook full of insight and clarity. The book will make a cherished gift for the poet lover.

irene koronas
poetry editor:
Wilderness House Literary Review
www.whlreview.com
reviewer:
Ibettson Street Press

Presa 14: Tribute to Hugh Fox

Presa 14
Tribute to Hugh Fox
Presa :S: Press
2011 $8.50

Thirty three writers have given their tribute to the poet/writer Huge Fox. The last verse
of John Marvin's poem, sums it up nicely:

"then splashing in a quiet pool
singing soft songs of silence
treading water toward a center
smooth on its surface
then drifting in a current
growing swifter with depth
grasing waist and ankles
so gentle so caressing
so silent and so swelling
so much swifter and so still
then swifter still"

Hugh Fox was the king of small press and he became known to many of us through Doug Holder
who championed Hugh through out many years of correspondance and friendship. Many of
the writer knew Hugh for many years and some came to know him through his writing and
knew him for a short time. All the writers respect him with a genuine understanding:

R.S.
"can't hear myself think
over the scream
of your cinnamon thighs

as if
a plugged-in appliance were tossed in a bathtub
between us

we teach each other
how to be born
without parents

yours
taught mine
how to rhyme

first night in our house together
no furniture
every night of our lives

when you are away from me
i am
too

Mike Spikes

In the rememberance, Ellaraine Lockie, relates, "a week with Hugh Fox..I didn't know which gender
would arrive at the train station." This is a must read if you want an insight into the multi-faceted man:

"Foxy said his preoccupation now that he's in his seventies
is "death and how to get the maximum out of the little time we have
above ground." I can attest that he lived this philosophy for the
week we were together. Every following day resembled the first one
in its serendipitous and often outrageous course."

Ibbetson St Press Sponsors: Jazz at the JCC: Robert Pinsky, Stan Strickland, John Lockwood, Rakalam Bob Moses...

(Stan Strickland)

(Robert Pinsky)









I have been on the Arts/Idea faculty at the Jewish Community Centers of Greater Boston for several years-and I was asked to sponsor Jazz and Poetry at the JCC--This is a great event that combines the music of poetry with the music of Jazz...hope you will attend.--Doug Holder/Ibbetson Street Press




JAZZ AND POETRY AT THE JCC

NEWTON, MA – Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky combines his interest in jazz and poetry in a music-inflected reading with renowned jazz musicians Stan Strickland (saxophone), John Lockwood (bass) and Rakalam Bob Moses (drums) on Saturday, December 10, at 8pm, at the Leventhal-Sidman Jewish Community Center in Newton.

Pinsky, a professor of creative writing at Boston University and author of 19 books, is known for his ability to bring poetry to life. Strickland, a singer, saxophonist, flutist and actor, has performed throughout the world and has opened for jazz greats Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins. John Lockwood has performed with jazz musicians Pharoah Sanders, Joe Pass, and Gary Burton. Rakalam Bob Moses is an American jazz drummer who has performed with Larry Coryell, Pat Metheny and Jack DeJohnette.

The event is part of the Jewish Community Centers of Greater Boston Ryna Greenbaum JCC Center for the Arts. Cost is $24. Students and seniors: $20. For tickets, contact 617-965-5226, boxoffice@jccgb.org or visit www.jccgb.org/arts. Co-sponsored by Boston Jewish Music Festival, Ibbetson Street Press of Somerville and QuickMuse.






Jewish Community Centers of Greater Boston
333 Nahanton Street · Newton, MA 02459 · 617-558-6522 www.jccgb.org

CONTACT: Larry Keller
617-558-6410 lkeller@jccgb.org

Hanging Loose 99 // Editors: Robert Hershon, Dick Lourie, Mark Pawlak

Hanging Loose 99

Editors: Robert Hershon, Dick Lourie, Mark Pawlak,

Hanging Loose Press

ISSN: 0440-2316

$9.00

Review by Dennis Daly



Cityscapes as soaring, airy and luscious as any watercolor abstracts I’ve ever seen greet you and draw you into the new issue of Hanging Loose. The watercolors are entitled, “Downtown Windows: Ten Watercolors” and include both the front and back covers in their number. The back cover I especially like because the geometry builds a mirror image causing you to bounce off of it and return to the proper, that is, frontal entrance of this literary magazine. Pretty neat.

As if to counteract the lightness of the art work, the written pieces sit like heavy furniture. Sherman Alexie starts things off with a couple of sonnet-like prose poems on addiction, dating between whites and Indians, and mental illness. Both poems are smart and funny. His third poem, The Naming Ceremony recites a litany of fantasized Indian names, which pretty much describes a hurting and damaged psyche. It’s musical and surprising and continues for five full pages like this,



My Indian name is Fish Bone Choke,

So that means my spirit animal is

Dr. Henry Heimlich.

My Indian name is Bear Hug.

My Indian name is Magic Trick.

My Indian name is Navajo Rug,

Though I’m not Navajo.



And like this,



My Indian name is Doesn’t Sing.

My Indian name is Doesn’t Dance.

My Indian name is Pongs But Won’t Ping.

My Indian name is Hate At First Glance,

Which seems like a cynical name,

I know, but damn, I’m an Indian.



William Corbett, a writer based in Boston Massachusetts, writes a series of short poems called,” Elegies for Michael Gizzi.” He lightens things a bit when he describes a memorial reading for Gizzi this way,



One of our tribe

Will read too long

Check the time

And continue on.

If this doesn’t happen

The night will be unmemorable

Like a wedding absent the drunk

Dentist on all fours barking.



I found Glen Freeman’s poem, “The Atheist Goes Into Surgery,” riveting. Little observations in the operating room take the place of a believer’s prayers; or rather they become the prayers,



His gaze fixed above him, circumscribed

By robotic lights, the sterile

White ceilings & whispers

Of which way he will be turned

When asleep, the checks & hushed

Double checks in single syllables…



Joan Larkin’s poem, “Trough” also grips you by the throat with a portrayal of a poet buried with his poems and dearly- bought pencil in a mass grave. The metaphor of the fusion of bodies with poems is both troubling and effective,



Bitter red and copper

Seep into us

And into us the small

Notebook in his coat



This issue includes quite a few prose pieces by Steven Schrader—all well done. My favorite is “Timex,” which deals with a father- son relationship and a cheap watch. The watch, which replaces a much more expensive timepiece, seems to absorb emotion in an almost magical way and hold onto it. The way the author deals with this complicated relationship during the extreme circumstances of his father’s illness and death is both affecting and revealing. He loses himself in a methodical attention to seemingly unimportant facts to submerge his feelings. For instance, the author notes, “He picked up my watch once to check the time.”

Without question the centerpiece of the issue is a short story by Wang Ping entitled, “Kelisu Diner,” which is set in Lhasa, Tibet. The narrator finds this off-the-beaten- path diner, which serves tea and hot buns. This is the type of place travelers to unusual destinations come across frequently. Each time she leaves the diner, she finds herself drawn back. Mega-issues of social and cultural consequence are faced here, issues that do not lead to easily accessible answers. There is also a wonderful scene that takes place inside the Jokhang Monestery with a monk, who acts as the bouncer. It’s classic. The other details of this story are so right on that you can almost taste the yak butter tea.

The emotional high point of this well balanced issue is a poem by Paul Violi, who has since died, called, “Now I’ll Never Be Able To Finish That Poem to Bob.” The poem is first rate and very clever to boot. In it the poet, ending in a serious tone, praises the editor of Hanging Loose, Bob Hershon, as “a wise man.” From what I can see he may have been on to something.

Greg Delanty: THE NEW CITIZEN ARMY

Greg Delanty: THE NEW CITIZEN ARMY (9”x55/8” =230mm x 143mm, 68pp, #249/300,

Combat Paper Press, Burlington VT USA, 2010, USD$18)





It’s not often that a book’s cover is as or even more interesting than its contents.

This small-press chapbook, I tell my longtime friend & publisher Marshall Brooks

in West Dover VT who sent it to me, shows that “The pkg. is the msg,” McLuhanly,

you don’t really even need to read the book to get the msg. because its cover more

than just appears to replicate a partisan manual.



Its thick grey covers, made from cloth ground up & laid as paper, were “produced

by John La Falce, Drew Matott, Pam DeLuco, John Turner, and Jerry Kovis

using military uniforms. These uniforms carry a lineage of over one hundred

military service members serving from WWII to the current and ongoing conflicts.

The binding was hand-sewn with linen thread. The covers were printed letterpress

at the San Francisco Center for the Book. The cover production and binding were

performed at the Green Door Studio in Burlington VT, where Combat Press resides.”

(from the Colophon, p 68 unnumbered)



You need to know this much to know what this small-press is capable of.



The book’s contents are by an Irish poet you may never have heard of



But first, here’s his 19-line sig. poem:



The New Citizen Army



Today, as every day, you rise up, don your suit

denims, dress, whatever fatigues

Society rigs you out in. You’ll be one among

minions under orders.

You’ll not think of it like this, you’ll not

think once. You will breakfast,

hardly aware that long ago you were drafted,

a soldier in the New Citizen Army,

This is as it should be; all regulars must be

mindless in the execution of duty,

you’ll drive to work, the office, the hospital,

the university -- wherever you make your living.

All day you will make your dying, a good taxpayer.

After you arrive home, you settle back

On the couch, surf the news, the bodies laid out in neat rows.

Men, women, children, parents weeping,

The daily massacre. You have obeyed the command.

You think nothing of it. You have played your part.

You are the good citizen. Sit back. Relax.





Audenish, but moreso; TV-era, Bosnian War, current Afghanistan War. THE NEW CITIZEN ARMY also includes some poems set in classical Greece:




Government



The eight winds blow.

an earthquake shakes Mount Olympus: cholera

ravages the states, drought everywhere, the mysterious

death of bees throughout the country,

the flowers and crops die, the daily

slaughtering of innocents,



and all we do is debate,

in the assembly, cast ostraka – shards of democracy –

regarding our ships, the color of their sails.





Now for the author:



[From Wikipedia]: Delanty was born in Cork, Eire, in 1958, and is generally placed in the Irish tradition. He now lives for most of the year in America. He became an American citizen in 1994, retaining his Irish citizenship. Irish novelist Colum McCann, who has also resettled in America, has described Delanty as the poet laureate of the contemporary Irish-in-America: “Delanty has catalogued an entire generation and its relationship to exile. He is the laureate of those who have gone.” (think of the historic shule agrah, the pre-Eire 'wild swans' of yore.)



Nowadays, they’re what Boston MA calls “The New Irish” Their exile is quasi-voluntary. Some apply for and win green cards in the citizenship lottery, so you can safely assume they left in search of work, not liberty (like the 'wild swans' did.) As a writer-in-residence at St . Michael’s College in Winooski VT, Delanty teaches poetry workshops; Irish Literature; poetry; Introduction to Literary Studies: Modern American Poetry. He’s current President of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers.





~ Bill Costley


Valley Village Bldg.4 apt.4-D
390 N. Winchester Blvd.
Santa Clara CA 95050-6541
(408) 247-1943
www.costleybill7.blogspot.com

Somerville Poet/Philosopher Jody Azzouni: A Poet who works within his limitations.

Somerville Poet/Philosopher Jody Azzouni: A Poet who works within his limitations.

By Doug Holder



Jody Azzouni is a poet who works within his own limitations. This accomplished bard and Philosophy Professor at Tufts University believes we can't see these limits because of our own "blind spots." And like many writers, Azzouni does quite well within the confines of his own limits.

Azzouni has been writing since he was twelve: Poetry, Fiction, Philosophy. He's been a professor in the philosophy department at Tufts University since 1986, and lives in Somerville. His most recent book of poetry is "Hereafter Landscapes," published with the Poet's Press. I talked with him on my Somerville Community Access TV Show: " Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer."




Doug Holder: You describe yourself as a "New Yorker." Define that.



Jody Azzouni: The first thing I would say about it is that involves a lot of caffeine. There is a high speed element to being a New Yorker. You move more quickly--you react quickly--even if you don't show it. So I see that as an essential element of my personality. That's a more positive thing than saying I have a Attention Deficit Disorder.



DH: In your view, according to one of your philosophy books: Talking About Nothing: Numbers, hallucinations and fictions much that we talk about in poetry and fiction as well as mathematics and science doesn't exist in any sense at all. Explain.


JA: The easiest examples are fictional characters. They don't exist. I also make strange claims. As a philosopher I believe there are no mathematical objects. Yet mathematics is indispensable to the sciences. It shows up everywhere. And yet I claim none of those mathematical terms refer to anything. So in many cases we use things that are not real, to get at things that are real in an indirect way. It is hard too do it directly. Either because what we are trying to get to is too complicated or because we don't know enough about it. Like when we talk about dreams--we are not talking about real events; we are actually talking about certain psychological events or neurological events. We are talking about it in a way we have access to it.


DH: You teach Philosophy at Tufts University, and you are a published poet. Does your academic calling weave into your poetry?



JA: Not really. At least not that I am aware of. It is one person, me, who is writing the short stories, another person who is writing the poetry and another the philosophy. There must be some continuity but I am not aware of it. When I sit down to write a poem I am not thinking about philosophy--although philosophical ideas come up.



DH: Is poetry more intuitive than philosophy?



JA: Officially speaking yes. But the way I do it-- no. Instinct shows up in both fields for me. Craft and the same mixture of conscious and unconscious elements appear.



DH: You say you don't incorporate your past in your poetry. How can you avoid this?



JA: In some sense I am incorporating my memories. What I am not doing is something largely autobiographical. I don't tell stories or borrow characters from my past, etc... I make up a lot of stuff. I am more like a dramatic poet who is masquerading as a Confessional poet. A lot of my poems that I write are in the first person. I am a Dramatic Confessional poet I suppose. I act. I like to do this because I really like to get into different sensibilities.



DH: You say we all work within our limitations. What are yours?



JA: I am the wrong person to ask. I work within them so I really can't see them. We all have blind spots. Like in John Cheever's short stories, I noticed that nobody seems to be friends-no discussion of friends. This is a dimension that does not seem to be part of his work. Whether Cheever knew this or not I have no idea. But with most writers--they can't say which element is missing. Sometime this limitation can make the work unusual. I feel Kafka's writing has many limitations--but that is what makes it unusual.






Intercourse


The small dark, cozy
like holding hands
that block the light between them.
Surprisingly, this is a good thing.
We pond together; skinny-dip beneath the sheets.
Only the eyes, their pupils expanding like hopes,
draw light and offer it pooled and sweetened,
the dim dispersed by twinned glows.


--Jody Azzouni

Anne Frank Lives: A Play by Lawrence Kessenich

(Lawrence Kessenich--playwright)














Anne Frank Lives
A Play by Lawrence Kessenich
Reading at Boston Playwrights’ Theater
Boston MA

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

When I first heard of the idea behind the play: Anne Frank survived the Holocaust and was alive in New York circa 1962, I had grave doubts about one of the iconic symbols of the six million who died at the hands of the Nazis being misused or misrepresented by a modern day writer, not Jewish, for the sake of a play. After attending this reading, however, I can attest that playwright/poet Lawrence Kessenich has achieved a marvelous play that brings life – on stage – a double faceted view of what might happened, or not.

The Anne Frank as Kessenich conceives her is also Ann Franklin resident of a mental institution in New York. She claims to be Anna Frank, but her psychiatrist tells her she is Anna Franklin. She does her best to try and convince him, she goes back and forth between her two personae and the audience wonders is she, or isn’t she? Even Anna Frank’s father is torn when he visit’s her at the hospital and she asks, “Why don’t you hug me?” But of course he cannot because he does not believe it can really be her.

The play is interspersed with characters at the hospital who include a patients who believes she is Marie Antoinette, a man who says he is Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
and the ghost of Anne’s mother, who died in a concentration camp.

In the end, Anne Frank’s father comes to accept her, even though the audience probably does not. Is his acceptance mere hope, a desire to have his daughter back or an illusion?

The answers are not always clear, though in one of her final monologues Anne/Ann says she must remain dead because, “It is the least I can do for my people.” She is afraid the Holocaust will be considered a fraud if she is alive. But perhaps it could also be said then that she is doing it for the world, whether real or not.

It is a play I look forward to seeing in full production where it will be worthy of a wide audience.

Ploughshares 40th Anniversary Edition

Ploughshares 40th Anniversary Edition

Ploughshares
Emerson College
120 Boylston St.
Boston, MA 02116
(617) 824-3757
pshares@emerson.edu
$14.




Review by Alice Weiss




DeWitt Henry, founder and longtime editor of Ploughshares, has made the adventure of contemporary writing synonymous with his name. 1970’s criticism by conservative critics claimed contemporary literary magazines like Ploughshares served only to promote an institutionalized outlet for mediocrity rather than the Modernist innovation of the magazines of the 1920’s. Dewitt Henry responded: “the question is less one of providing sanctuary for Avant Garde than it is of providing access and recognition for a whole new generation of writers remarkable for their diversity of directions.” That diversity posed deep issues about standards of taste. An audience had to be created that would be able to appreciate not only particular new writers but also the plenitude of new writing. The way the founders established to do this was that each issue would have different guest editor who in choosing the works appearing in his or her issue would indeed create that audience for his or her own work. The assumption is that by choosing a variety of writings that each one likes, honors, learns from or teaches, readers join the adventure of apprehending the guest’s work understanding more deeply his/her concerns and creativity, the work itself.


The 40th anniversary issue reflects this model exquisitely. Henry has made this issue a working summary of the last forty years of Ploughshares. Twenty-five former guest editors--of which Alice Hoffman, Sue Miller, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Lloyd Schwartz, James A. McPherson are only a few--nominated and introduced an emerging writer, gave an account of a turning point in their careers, or contributed a new work. Largely a collection of short stories, parts of novels, poems, memoir, only one of the contributors, Richard Tillinghast, in his essay “Turning Points” provides such an account. It is a quiet piece, episodic, it does not claim a great deal for itself, but I find it a lens for many of the other voices and yearnings that show up in this edition. Tillinghast’s turning point relies on maps, a summer in Turkey, a late permanent residence in Ireland, learning new languages, living in new old environments, all of which give him the chance to create anew, to return, as it were, to the starting point to see who he is now, to start over as often as possible, to produce vigorously perceived art.


It is not just individuals that start over, generations do and culture, as well.The conjunction of introductions by established writers and the new writers they introduce suggests one generation scooping up the following to toss it in the air like a toddler, laughing. In a brief, sort of tossed up in the air introduction, James A. McPherson offers us Nicholas Butler’s story “Apples,” to which Dewitt Henry gives pride of place. An an explicit account of what it’s like to have to start over, it’s the first story in the magazine. The protagonist has lost his job as an appliance salesman and suffers through the shame, the listlessness, the sense of distance from his wife. We observe him working his way through his misery, encountering disappointments along the way. Jobs his brothers hand him run out. Yet there are rituals of engagement he maintains, baseball games, etc. which lead to a job picking apples alone in an orchard and finally an encounter with man whose sense of loss mirrors his own. Except that man’s misery is not about losing a job, rather the wife he loved all his life. It is at this point that we realize that the wife has been the underlying energy in the story and provides the occasion for an unanticipated recovery. It is, incidentally, a wonderful read. Further by placing this story as the first story in the magazine, the editor is using his considerable editorial genius to point to our contemporary losses, really, if you think about it the most pressing issue as we all encounter the loss of jobs, our children’s despair and dislocation at the turn things have taken.


Elizabeth Spires’ introduction to Lindsay Stuart Hill’s poems, is a further example of what I take to be the two implicit themes of the issue: the ongoing attempt to create a taste by which new work can be appreciated, and the exploration of dealing with loss and starting over. Spires points to the loss, especially in “Nanquan Kills a Cat,” but also explains how the poem works in illustrating the ‘fundamental tension between Buddist compassionate detachment and the basic human need to attach.” She does indeed teach us how to read an American poem from a Buddhist perspective. And if you assume that learning something new, starting over, inevitably involves slowing down perception while the world goes on at the same pace, as of course it must, then Susan Falco’s memoir, “Catcher’s Hang,” about learning the art of trapeze, adds further depth to the development of the overriding theme of the collection. Dan Wakefield’s introduction to this piece is quietly the best introduction in the issue; he associates the metaphor of the acrobat with his own yearning for grace, in short, he tells us what the work means to him.
Readers interested in following the theme of loss through the issue should not miss Jynne Dillling Martin’s “Dropped Things Are Bound to Sink.” Beginning with an image of a cricket against “this enormous planet/ attesting to a cosmic order,” the poem sweeps like desert wind through images of nature and history. It is a really smart “Ozymandius” that, in graceful edgy syntactically complex couplets arrives at an image of the end of the world.


Beneath a hot sun that offers nothing I do not already own,
I suck the meat off a great seabird, kick sand over his crooked bones.

Ms. Martin’s poem bears no similarity to the work of Alice Hoffman, yet Hoffman’s piece, published here, ”Treasure,” partakes in a similar aesthetic: twisting a father-daughter relationship such that irrevocable damage is done by the character of the father’s cruelty and longing for the things of science, a father whose avarice “left him charred” in a world where much else is charred beyond recognition. Hoffman is the guest editor of an upcoming issue. This story suggests that issue will be edgier and uncompromising in ways we have not seen in this writer before.


The exerpt from Sue Miller’s new novel, “Burning Summer” about a woman married to a man who is fast losing his mental faculties, also addresses issues of loss and getting by with some sense of self intact, despite the day to day compromises. Howard Norman’s piece “Next Life Might be Kinder” in a background that includes a vivdly if succinctly described exhibit of Robert Frank Photographs, against a story told by a truculent, but ultimately comic, unreliable narrator. Jay Neubegorn’s “Tag Sale” from his novel, The Other Side of World also deals with impending loss, this time though, through the mind of a character convinced of his mediocrity, almost unable to see how funny his version of events is.


Suffice it to say this is an issue with many pleasures and challenges. It is clear to me that whatever else DeWitt Henry is, teacher, writer, innovator, he is a brilliant and exciting editor and that is reflected by the work in this issue.

Somerville Artist Hope Ricciardi: Paints the Painful Past of her Ancestors

Somerville Artist Hope Ricciardi: Paints the Painful Past of her Ancestors

By Doug Holder

To know what we are, we must know where we come from. The past is often muddled, memory fails us, often familial histories are selective and leave out the painful moments. Somerville artist Hope Ricciardi addresses her ancestral past through her evocative art. Sadly, past generations of her clan were victims of the Armenian Genocide. This tragic event occurred in the early part of the last century when many Armenians were slaughtered or thrown into a diaspora by the Turks. Often this tragedy has been overshadowed by the Jewish Holocaust that was engineered by the nefarious forces of Nazi Germany. Ricciardi's art brings the Genocide in the forefront with her skillful brush, and unique sensibility.

Ricciardi, who has a space at the Joy Street Studios states on her website: " My ancestry and roots in Armenian history are the catalyst for my current work." In 2011 her exhibition "History Ignored" that dealt with her roots in Armenian history was presented at Galatea Fine Art Gallery in Boston. She works in photo transfers and plaster gesso (fluid white coating, composed of plaster of paris, chalk, gypsum, or other whiting mixed with glue, applied to smooth surfaces such as wood panels, plaster, stone, or canvas to provide the ground for tempera and oil painting ) on various surfaces including canvas, linen and panels. She has an exhibit of her work at Arsenal Center of the Arts in Watertown, Mass that will run through Jan. 2, 2011.

Ricciardi lives in Franklin, Mass and commutes to her studio in Somerville. The Joy Street Studios building is a converted factory where a diverse group of artists work. Ricciardi reflected on working in the suburbs, like Franklin as opposed to a city like Somerville: " Working in Franklin is like working in a vacuum. I once tried to exhibit some abstract nudes in the Town Hall and they wound up in some closet. I really need the artistic energy of place like Somerville to keep me going."


Ricciardi trained at the Museum School in Boston and has taught in a number of private schools. She was Dean of Admissions at the tony Walnut Hill School for the Arts in Natick, Mass. She left that position to devote herself to her art.


Her paintings are haunting and in many cases she uses photographs she has seen as the basis for her work. In one painting " Lost Youth," we see a long table of spectral children sitting in the midst of a surreal landscape. The painting depicts the 5,000 or so children who were orphaned and found in the desert in Turkey in 1915--victims of the Armenian Genocide.


Ricciardi who joined me for a famed scone at the Sherman Cafe in Union Square seems like a dedicated artist, who wants to recover her past and move on with a clear eye to the future.

The American Eye by Eric Hoffman

The American Eye
by Eric Hoffman
Copyright 2011 by Dos Madres Press inc.
Dos Madres Press
Loveland OH 45140
Softbound, 71 pages, no price
ISBN 978-1-933675-65-7

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Found poetry has become a favorite tool for a number of poets. Search through writings of those who not always closely associate with poetry and find in their prose something
akin to poetry and use as poetry. The next best thing is to find someone’s writing and make them into your own poetry.

Eric Hoffman has succeeded admirably with this book in which Hoffman lends his voice and vision to both Ralph Waldo Emerson and his godson William James. In the first set
of poems, “Emerson in Europe,” we find him looking at he ocean, thinking back:

My eye is American.
Like a chemist assembling substances
I bring myself to sea
In search of affinities –

The bubble –
By its birthright – expands –
& my American eye
Is like a child’s again


Later, in Malta, Hoffman envisions Emerson’s view of native women, adding a touch of humanity to his otherwise staid image as a man of the cloth, man of Victorian sensibilities:

A few beautiful faces in the dancing crowd
& a beautiful face is worth going far to see

That which is finest in beauty is moral
& the attraction of a long descended maiden

Is a sort of wild virtue, wild & fragrant
As the violets that surprise the mind
Meeting divinity amidst flowers and trifles

The initial section of the book, therefore, deals with not only Hoffman’s interpretations
of Emerson’s journals, but his poetic view of the emotional Emerson. We also see
Italy through words culled from Emerson’s writings and transposed into the poetic. For example:

In the Sistine Chapel
To see the Pope
Bless his palms
& hear his choir
Chaunt the passion

The second part of the book is entitles “The Vast Practical Engine” in which Hoffman presents various thoughts on philosophy of our innermost self:

what are the physics
of violence? or

are we the embodiment
of need, our tenderness

merely an apparition
approximate

to appetite’s defeat?

“There is no certainty,
only those who are certain”

that the heart is small

that the world
cradles and destroys

that the triumph of breathing
rescues
and buries

In another poem (10.) we find:

nothing is so precise
as imagination
but what demon

hides in the most
precise equations
what infinitesimally

small loss occurs
at that invisible edge
maps the distance

between the mind of God
and the limits of
absolute reason

There is nothing new in Hoffman’s inventions of past writings, however, what he has accomplished is a deep reading of many concepts, the poetry more philosophical and cobbled into ideas that will make readers think twice, go back to the book to discover new ideas, theories, philosophies and changes which he has superbly succeeded in conveying.

Bards,Bagels and Co-Existence

I never thought of this when Harris Gardner and I started the Bagel Bards at Finagle- A- Bagel in Harvard Square in 2004. But I happened to be teaching a Creative Writing class at Endicott College and we were studying the poetry of San Francisco poet A.D. Winans. In an interview I conducted with him (that I used for a class discussion) he mentioned a hangout of his: the Co-Existence Bagel Shop. Bagels, Bards and poetry do have an illustrious history. The Co-Existence Bagel Shop in the 1950's and 60's North Beach section of San Francisco was a big hangout for the likes of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Kaufman, Spicer, Winans, and countless other Beat poets, and poets of other schools. So the Bagel Bards, a group of poets and writers that now meets in the Au Bon Pain in Davis Square, Somerville, Mass (Finagle-A Bagel closed years ago)is a sort of a small coda to this...


Here is a description from a Beat travel guide I found:


"Continue along to 1398 Grant Avenue which is Stop 10. This is the former site of the Co-Existence Bagel shop where a delicatessen "collided" with a beer-joint-hangout and news center. It was immortalized by Bob Kaufman in Bagel Shop Jazz who describing its regulars as "shadow people, blueberry-eyed girls in black stockings, smelling vaguely of mint jelly, turtle neck angel guys, coffee-faced ivy Leaguers..."

Review of THE HALLELUJAH OF LISTENING by Preston H. Hood

Review of THE HALLELUJAH OF LISTENING by Preston H. Hood, Cervena Barva Press, PO Box 440357, W. Somerville, MA 02144-3222, www.cervenabarvapress.com, 59 pages, $7, 2011

Review by Barbara Bialick, author of TIME LEAVES

Preston H. Hood’s writing is in a rolling rhythmic voice. Some of his images are powerful, while others are plain and every day. Is he the American Every Man veteran soldier? In some ways yes, but in other ways I doubt it. He has some very strange lines such as in “Opening in the Sky”: “Before the dead crawl out I stitch it up/with the white line of my thinking…” Or, in “Hazy Light”: “For too long you hoarded/two dollar bills of nothing/like the no-light forest/triple canopy of grief…”

Sometimes he loves his grandson or some woman, we assume. But there’s little about human relationships. There’s more about the voices of nature and the ghosts of veterans past. In “To Shadow” he writes “To shadow go the wounded & scarred, each/of their kills smeared in blood…Gone to shadow the cawing crows flapping/with the walking dead/those/dark wings of war.”

In “First Born” he concludes, he’s “dropped from the shared womb of his mother’s drinking/incubated three months/time shafts through him, down-pointing/what’s next/the rain/fog/purification of lather sky…go back/listen/know the fear of his deepest self/talk to it like it’s him, which it is/find what’s lost.”

But what he claims he’ll most remember are his experiences in the Viet Nam War, such as he writes in “Boats Near Hue”: “A sail luffs & I imagine these men, their boats,/bobbing on the South China Sea, Dark clouds shoulder into a gathering storm/Shift of wind, push of boat./One false move might trigger a mine.”

Hood was born in Fall River, MA and grew up in Swansea, MA. He served in Viet Nam with Seal Team2 (1970). He has a BA from UMass-Boston, a BS from the University of Southern, Maine, and an ME from the University of Maine, Orono. After attending the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences for nine years, he co-edited “Summer Home Review” with Jacqueline Loring and Gary Rafferty. He’s currently a retired teacher and administrator

Choir of Day: New and Selected Poems By Robert K. Johnson

Choir of Day: New and Selected Poems

By Robert K. Johnson

ISBN: 978-0-979-5313-3-0

Ibbetson Street Press

$14.00

Review by Dennis Daly



If you like taut moments, touching scenes and wings of sunlight, these tempered yet beautifully written poems are for you. In a Morning to Remember Johnson takes a very ordinary Norman Rockwell-like slice of life memory and injects it with devastating future- knowledge. He describes the arrival and sing-song Halloo of a little boy outside his kitchen door, who

Holds up his ball and mitt—

ready to play catch—

the week before he drowned.

In My View of a New England Autumn, the poet relates the deaths of both his parents with a graphic realism very unlike the details of the gorgeous deepening blaze of his present autumn, “dying/ a few leaves at a time,”

My father waved back to me

as I left his hospital room;

and, a minute later, gasped

in pain and died.

He describes his mother as steadily looking worse until,

while I bent over her bed,

her eyes hardened

like blue water turning to ice.

After portraying his nine year old first-born son making his way through the ordinary world of delivering newspapers and bike riding in his poem, While Driving, the poet loses himself in an instinctual, yet touching moment when he celebrates,

And my brain and pumping blood—

Every part of me says,

That’s my son. My son.

In the poem, Our Daughter’s First Time Away From Home, there is another deceptively simple scene, in which the poet’s daughter discovers a little gesture,

… when we start to drive

away, an impulse leads you

to discover what it feels like

to blow someone a kiss.

In The Speck the winged protests of a fly unable to breech the seasonal impediments are compared to the vain protests of a poet trying to make straight-line sense out of the world’s circularity,

And though, unlike the fly,

I have a mind and it tells me

“In vain,” I—too—protest: despite

the chills of age, I keep

circling—in these straight lines I write.

Choir of Day is filled with sunlight, much of it falling on wings. In The Lecture the poet juxtaposes the techniques of teaching poetry with an actual moment of inspiration,

… And, glancing outside, you see

the sunlight splash a swooping bluejay’s wings

gold-bright… and know no word your students heard

roused what, in you, that flash of sunlight stirred.

In Parvane, a haunting poem, the moment of knowledge comes with winged sunlight this way:

and you will see a distant bird

gliding with sunlight on its wings

across a shining field

where the tip of a tree’s low branch

waits for the bird to alight.

The poem Lover’s Words starts off this way:

Each gliding gull that tips sunlight

across its tilting wings will die

and so will love. …

For Johnson love seems to be yet another poetic moment or time or inspiration only more so. Therefore true love, like poetry’s moment, is fleeting, does not survive death, and possibly not even our life spans, since whenever the gods decree,

the love we share will be as dead

as flowers frozen by an early frost

Johnson’s Choir of Day is chock-full of troubling, touching poems like these and well worth the read.

Ralph Pennel: From the Twin Cities to the Paris of New England

Ralph Pennel: From the Twin Cities to the Paris of New England

By Doug Holder

Poet and writer Ralph Pennel met me in the comforting confines of the Bloc 11 Café in Union Square, Somerville to talk about the writing life. Pennel has moved from his home in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Somerville, Mass. He lives in the hinterlands of our town, where the Spanish eatery Dali looks across the street to the Wine Cask. Pennel reflected on the differences of the Midwest to that of New England:

“Everything in the Midwest is laid out in a grid—I find the winding and at times irrationally plotted streets in Somerville give it a looser or open vibe. There is a rigidity to the Midwest that I am not comfortable with. The writing community in Somerville is very welcoming. It seems the writing that happens in Minnesota stays in Minnesota—it doesn’t seem to leak out to the greater literary world.”

Pennel views himself equally as a poet and a writer. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University, and has taught on the college level for a number of years.

While in Minnesota, he founded with a few other folks, an online literary magazine titled The Midway Journal, coined after a section of Minneapolis that he resided in. He told me the journal publishes work that pushes boundaries— and accepts work in the genres of poetry and flash fiction. The current issue has work from noted local writer Timothy Gager, and past issues have had such Boston area wordsmiths as Steve Almond, Tara Masih and Alden Jones.

For Pennel a poem gets it start with an idea that sparks his agile mind, and then hopefully flames into a working poem.

Pennel most assuredly lives the writer’s life. He resides in a small, inexpensive apartment and edits his journal and teaches an online course or two. He also hits the open mics around town including Stone Soup in the Out of the Blue Gallery in Cambridge, Mass., and Somerville’s First and Last Word Reading Series held at the Arts Armory.

Pennel is planting roots in the community, and where there are roots, hopefully poetry flowers.



CONFIDING IN THE PRISON GUARD

“After me comes one more powerful than I . . . I baptize you with water,

but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” -Mark 1:7-8

You see these garments? I made them.

With these hands. See here? This is the very place

I cut myself on the blade of my knife.

See how it has healed, how the flesh

has closed itself again, grown together, pink and new?

And this belt. I tanned it from the same beast.

She brought me to within sight of these city walls.

Then collapsed. I held her head in my lap,

stroking her neck until the sun set low,

and the night was filled with fire. It is true

what they say about the death of the day.

My soul, too, will rise above the parting sun soon enough.

No doubt you will be the one to set it free.

Ah, these hands. They have touched his head. His hair

filled my palms, slipped over and through my fingers,

until my hands were hidden, as if they, too, grew peaceably from his skin.

He said nothing when I lowered him into the river, his body weightless.

I was afraid I’d lose him to the current, his body swept downstream.

What would come of me then? I swear, when he stood, the water swimming

down his face and plunking into the river around him like fingers

on a harp, the day gave way to night, the sun smeared across

the edge of the earth, then raced across the sky in rivers of light.

I understand I am to lose my head. Will you grant me this then,

that I might wash my face and hair? And would you also share

what I have told you? Not now. But after Herodias has slipped her fingers

through my mane and lifted my bodiless head above her own,

into the light, my blood dripping to the floor, the shadow of night

drifting calmly over everything.




.

Four Elements: Reflections on Nature by John Donohue

Four Elements

Reflections on Nature

John Donohue

ISBN 978-0-307-71760-3

Harmony Books, a Division of Random House

Contact: Nora O’Malley 212-782-8370

Review By Dennis Daly

As a rule, books categorized by their publishers as inspirational cause me to avert my eyes and hold onto my wallet. Four Elements by John O’Donohue is not one of those. It is rather a series of beautifully crafted essays tapping in to fourteenth century mysticism and twenty-first century environmental concerns.

O’Donohue, a Gaelic-speaking poet and priest from a remote parish in the west of Ireland, uses the ancient metaphor of the four elements—air, water, fire, and earth (stone) as the prism to explore the nature of man and his world. This is not cutesy new age drivel. Although simply written, it has a hard philosophical core. O’Donohue, by the way, had a PHD in Hegelian philosophy. That said, he does use Irish culture, including the likes of Yeats, Joyce, and Becket to support his points and charm the hell out of us.

In the first of the four sections of his book, O’Donohue meditates on air as the breath of God, which in a sense welcomes us as we enter the world and gives us the timespan of our lives. He speaks of breaths as prayers. Not the silly techniques taught by self-aggrandizing gurus, but real straightforward connections with the divine. He seems able to rework older religious myths into a new understanding of spiritual reality. In his poem In Praise of Air he says,

In the name of the air

The breeze

And the wind

May our souls

Stay in rhythm

With eternal

Breath

In this first section there is also a wonderful discussion of Michelangelo’s Prisoners in Stone, a series of sculptures I saw years ago in Florence. The lower half of each figure is still part of the stone, while the upper half is a fully formed human being. “This is the tension of emergence,” say O’Donohue, “such sculpture awakens one’s eyes to the power of encounter that is permanently going on between the air and each shape that allows it.” O’Donohue parlays this encounter into a discourse on life’s possibilities.

The next element, water, is used as a metaphor for spiritual need or thirst with a poetic exposition on “the gift of tears.” O’Donohue’s poem, In Praise of Water, touches on this,

Water: voice of grief

Cry of love

In the flowing tear

Rites from the Catholic faith like the sacrament of baptism and the tradition of holy water are put in a larger and lovely continuum that is nothing if not pantheistic.

Fire, the third element that O’Donohue muses on, encompasses man’s endless passions originating in the fire of creation. Here is the opening of O’Donohue’s In Praise of Fire:

In the beginning

The word was red

And the sound was thunder

And the wound in the unseen

Spilled forth the red weather of being.

An association is also developed between fear and fire. Children, who play with fire, get burned. Heretics and witches were for a time burned at the stake. Hell is eternal burning according to Church teachings. But here O’Donohue rejects his church’s darker vision as a grave misinterpretation and he even suggests some papal penance for past injustices committed in the name of his faith. Donohue, himself, retired from his priestly duties in 2000 to devout full time to writing and lecturing.

According to O’Donohue, stone, the fourth element, is a Zen-like presence, a repository of memory. Limestone contains the memories of the sea. Igneous rock contains memories of fire. Coal is organic rock. And so on. His concept of stone expands to landscapes, which he sees as having selfhoods, which interact in some interesting ways with humans. In fact he sees humans as expressions of the earth, sentries with an especial responsibility. The earth becomes a comforter, a great conclusion.

O’Donohue’s submergence of religious myth into a much larger pantheistic system rivals Francis of Assisi for nerve. In another age O’Donohue might have been one of those heretics burned at the stake that he so poignantly laments.

John O’Donohue died at the age of 52 in 2010. He wrote a number of books including two international best sellers, Anam Cara and To Bless the Space Between Us. The essays comprising Four Elements were written early in his career and are a perfect introduction into the wonders of this visionary’s later works.

Somerville Writer Janet Mendelsohn: Bringing her passion to the passion of her subjects.

(Picture by Stu Rosner)




Somerville Writer Janet Mendelsohn: Bringing her passion to the passion of her subjects.

By Doug Holder

Janet Mendelsohn is a passionate writer who writes about other people’s passions. This Davis Square resident has the ability to hone in on her subject like some predatory literary bird, and peck out what makes them tick—to strain an analogy. I met Mendelsohn on a warm October morning in one of my favorite haunts in Union Square, the Sherman Cafe.

Mendelsohn told me she and her husband love Somerville. Their children live next door in Arlington; her husband likes the quick commute into Boston, and they both love the stimulation and diversity that the Paris of New England generously provides.

Mendelsohn has had many roles in her impressive career. She has worked for a number of non-profits, and was more often than not a Public Relations person. Now she is a freelance writer and writes for the Boston Globe Travel Section, the Wellesley /Weston Magazine, Maine Boat, and other publications. She writes about people as diverse as a group of needlepointers in Wellesley, Mass. or an artist and his timber- framed home in the wilds of Maine.

Mendelsohn has a degree in Journalism, and an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She describes Creative Non-Fiction as a genre in which the writer becomes part of the story. The writer does not have to be as objective as he or she would in a standard journalistic piece.

I asked Mendelsohn about her work on a book about the history of Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Mass. This was an in-house publication that she worked on during her tenure there some years ago. She told me about the hospital that lies in the shadow of Mass. General and other behemoths:


“Mt. Auburn has a very fascinating past. It was founded by a Civil War nurse, Emily Parson. It has a strong connection to the literary community—Longfellow was an early supporter of the hospital and Robert Lowell contributed his work to a book that was used as part of a fundraiser for the hospital.”

Mendelsohn makes no bones about the valuable work she did as a PR person. I asked her how she would answer people who would say that this line of work was all about hype—sizzle with very little steak. She said:

“This makes me mad. When I was working for non-profits, hospitals, Wellesley College,etc.... I always felt it was my job to tell the stories about the institutions, and get the reporters to report about them. The press is too often fixated on scandals. I wanted them to know about the projects, the faculty, students, doctors, etc… were working on.”

As we ended our interview, Mendelsohn started to informally interview me about my Bagel Bards literary group. It is obvious her passion for people and their stories plays a defining role in her life.


For more info go to: http://www.janetmendelsohn.com

Macbeth// Music by Guiseppe Verdi Libretto by Maria Piave and Andrea Maffei// after William Shakespeare’s drama// Shubert Theater, Boston MA.

Macbeth
Opera by Verdi
Shubert Theater, Boston MA.
November 4 -13, 2011

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

If Shakespeare is the ultimate dramatist, Verdi is arguably his counterpart in opera. In his earlier years Verdi’s La Traviata, Rigoletto and Il Trovatore have become standards of opera company repertoire, while his later operas, considered by many his greatest works include Otello, Faust and Macbeth. This latter one is currently being staged at Boston’s Shubert Theater by the Boston Lyric Opera.

Having previously attended BLO renditions of other operas, including performances by the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico, this Macbeth can hold its own with any of them.

John Conklin’s set designs are a brilliant depiction of the hell that the characters have made of their own choosing. Off kilter sets reflect the twisted, murderous lives they lead, with lighting used to set mood and props used as ghosts, hands, forests and death.

While knives are the weapon of choice, the appearance of a gun and contemporary clothes reminds us this staging is a modern version of Verdi, not unlike Santa Fe’s production of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore updated to a World War II setting.

As for the performances, there is little negative to be said for singers. Daniel Sutin in his BLO debut brings the increasingly insane Macbeth to chilling life. His voice is strong, clear and powerful, his acting well matched to the role, particularly in dealing with the ghost of Banquo, who is amply sung and acted by Darren K. Stokes. Carter Scott, also in her BLO debut as Lady Macbeth, is convincing as the “behind every king there is an ambitious woman” and like her husband grows increasingly insane, unable to get the blood off her hands. Her voice is of top operatic quality, her pronunciations flawless and her ability to convey her insanity emphasize her acting ability.

A highlight of the opera is sung by Richard Crawley who as Macduff garnered a well deserved ovation with his stirring aria bemoaning the murder of his family and his determination to bring down Macbeth.

In fairness to the other singers, tenors rather than baritones always seem to gather more applause and cheers. And that is a shame because both Sutin and Stokes have excellent voices and display them well. And Stokes makes one scary ghost.


As for the score, Conductor David Angus elicits the maximum from his orchestra. While Verdi’s score is at times, well, Verdi, meaning at times a bit light for the drama, Angus manages to keep the music in tempo with the action, trauma and drama of this wonderful opera.

The Boston audiences was enthusiastic about this opera performance and by the end there
wereloud sustained applause, well deserved by the cast, conductor and everyone who made this opening night performance a success.

Sipping Memories: Poetic Journal to Morocco: Poems by Michal Mahgerefteh

Sipping Memories
Poetic Journal to Morocco
Poems by Michal Mahgerefteh
Poetica Publishing Co.
Copyright © 2011 by Michal Mahgerefteh
ISBN: 978-0-9836410-1-8
Softbound, 31 pages, $15

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

The opening welcome is provided by “a large woman flashes gold teeth/offers fresh round bread topped with pecan butter/walnut and pistachio cookies and hot green tea”

She takes you to the shuk in Rabat where “I stroll down narrow alleys/of mud covered pebble stones/faint must odor of carpets and urine/persists of the scent of fresh tangerines/stored in wood boxes/pushed by ragged men and worn-out donkey”

The way it is written you can see yourself there, or at least it will hark back one movie
or another one has seen that was filmed in this shuk in Rabat or another one.

This book, while poetic is also educational. There is a recipe for Moroccan tea, another for Couscous with Vegetables and a lesson on rosewater as a hydrating toner.

Her poetry takes you to Evening Prayer at Hassan II Mosque where:

I following the growing crowd
take off my boots walk under rounded arches
stepping down several feet on to a tiled floor
paved in blue

a group of women all in white
veils up to the bridge of their noses
sit on carpets adorned in blue-yellow vines
verses from the Quran

Ms. Mahgerefteh takes you on visit to the “Beggar on the Corner of Blvd de al Corniche” and “On the Road to Marrakesh.” At “The Sheep Market” you discover that “life hangs heavy over the women/inside fabric tens sweaty anchored/between large bags of raw wool/brought steaming after shearing/sorting colors in to piles/letting it fluff and dry before the endless/spinning and weaving”

You will also encounter “The Henna Artist” and “The Fabric Market” a Moroccon bride and you will hear “The Sounds of Morocco” from the school girls laughing to water sellers and cars, trucks, motorbikes and taxi cabs and, of course, Muezzin prayer calls.

If you are an adventurer or one who likes to read travel books, this poetry journey in
Morocco will fill the bill.

What’s Left Behind: Poems by Michal Mahgerefteh

What’s Left Behind
Poems by Michal Mahgerefteh
Poetica Publishing Co.
Copyright © 2011 by Michal Mahgerefteh
ISBN: 978-0-9836410-2-5
Softbound, 31 pages, $15

Review by Zvi A. Sesling



This book is dedicated by the author “to my father, for his unconditional love and support of my mother.” It is a book about the author’s mother who was diagnosed with breast cancer a the age of 41 and supported by her husband for the next 25 years. It is a book of poetry titles such as “For Twenty-Five Years,” “The Dy of Mother’s Passing,” “Things She Left Behind,” “The Agony of Looking Back” and “Portrait of a Man.” It is a book of grief and grieving and no happy ending except just reality as in “The Day of Mother’s Passing:”

edgy conversations erupt around the room
Mother’s sisters assess her display of bodily decline
over the years their strong bond easily tested
by tender emotions but tonight stitched to perfection

the light of life fades from Father’s face
as he prepares to accept the inevitable
staring at his swollen diabetic feet
wishing he could command this moment

Or in the poem “During the Shivah”

our house
holds its breath in mourning

Father in his bereavement
speaks only when necessary

he just sits there
stiff against the rough Mediterranean

till the mist rolls in
softening the sharp edges of the shoreline

with a slow sway
turning to blue—black bowl of night sky


These are raw emotional images of death and mourning that fill this book, no moments of happiness, right to the end of the book with “No More Hurt” in her father’s voice:

they want me to cover the mirrors
with black cloth
to avoid my mournful reflection
to think about you

the last twenty-five years
were all about you
no, I no longer care about cancer and death
Your Cancer—Your Death

all I want is to flee from your dark days
that sealed My Book of Life
until the hurt no longer
bears your name


Yes, this is a sad book, but one that may help others whose family has suffered the terrible effects of terminal illness that has extended itself for many years and affected family members. It may not provide the hope or the answers people seek, but it will help them cope when they see others have gone through their anguish.

PUSHCART PRIZE NOMINEES "IBBETSON STREET" 2011

PUSHCART PRIZE NOMINEES

“Ibbetson Street” 2011

(Nominators: Kim Triedman, Robert K. Johnson and Harris Gardner)


“Town Park, Late Autumn”- Author: Ted Kooser
“Creation” - Author: Bonny Barry Sanders


"Amish Country" - Author: Joyce Wilson
"New Hire Orientation" – Author: Patricia L. Hamilton


"From Stars" – Author:- Donna Johnson
"The Impressionists Indoors”-Author: Jennifer Barber