In Words of Alchemy, Camilla Downs invites you to walk with her to share her love of Nature and Life through a free-verse poetry memoir. During her daily strolls she is mindfully present as she delves into life in the raw and experiences her heart’s observations. Camilla embraces what happens when she opens her heart and invites the written words to flow.…
I don’t often read poetry, but when I do, I like it to be moderately straightforward and logical, able to reach my heart and stir emotions, buried deep as they are. The poems in Allan Cooper’s latest collection, Waiting for the Small Ship of Desire, fit the bill perfectly. They are clearly written by a poet who has lived and loved enough in his lifetime to confidently spin out some of the most touching words I have read in some time.…
Skin House got me with this line on its back cover: “Skin House is a story about two guys who end up in the same bar they started out in.” I thought, sweet, a kind of modern Waiting for Godot story. Wrong. But oh, so good in what it does do.
Take a down-and-out guy who stocks store shelves, add an ex-girlfriend who hates him while he still loves everything about her, his father Otis who lives unhappily in a nursing home and wonders who his son is, and his best friend, bald Gerry, who works in a meat department in a grocery store and competes with the guy for top rung on the loser ladder.…
all have experience with death. And dying. A couple of my grandparents died at home – apparently the peaceful, in-their-sleep manner. Another went at the hospital. As she passed she said with perfect lucidity, “Oh, look at the beautiful flowers!” (There were no painkillers involved.) The kind of stuff that stays with you, to interpret as you choose. But an in-law of mine passed after a stint at a hospice.…
