Celebrating Women’s History Month with a Poetry Chapbook
Title: Deeper Into the Pond
Subtitle: A Celebration of Femininity
Award: Bronze Medal from Military Writers Society of America
Authors: Carolyn Howard-Johnson and Magdalena Ball
Artwork: Jacquie Schmall
ISBN: 9781461159384
Available in print and as ebook on Amazon
Reviewed by Carolyn Wilhelm originally for Midwest Book Review
The Celebration Series of Poetry Chapbooks covers many aspects of life, seasons, and holidays. Deeper into the Pond: A Celebration of Femininity is about life as experienced and thought of by women. Poetry would be the perfect Mother's Day gift for critical thinkers.
As Howard-Johnson writes, progress has been made in women's lives while not in an orderly fashion. Progress isn't always in a straight line. Younger women do not realize what has been achieved. As Howard-Johnson writes:
"Let us be measured
Not for height or at the hip
But for our roles."
Howard Johnson's poems are about topics like a midlife crisis, narcissism, and her closet as a psychological profile. Hmmm, yes, closets (clothes) reveal much. I have never thought of writing a poem about such thoughts. She says memory has two voices which is a profound statement.
Ball writes of Lady Godiva and her mother burning a bra and how the word freedom is misused. She writes about hypergraphia (who knew?) and compulsion. A brave woman has her wig blowing in the wind due to cancer, a discarded dress in a landfill, and Jupiter's moons are other topics she addresses. Not everyday conversation!
The book offers readers much to contemplate and appreciate.
More About the Reviewer
TITLE: SUBTERRANEAN ADDRESS—NEW & SELECTED POEMS
AUTHOR: Judith Skillman
PUBLISHER: Deerbrook Editions
ISBN 979-8-9865052-2-0
$21.00
176 pp
Available on AMAZON.
BLURB:
"A collection that begins with a turnip and ends with a young seal shows the surprise and originality of an award-winning poet in tune with nature and herself. An amazing compilation to enjoy in wonder and delight."~ Carol Smallwood
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Carol Smallwood received the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. She is the author of books of poetry, nonfiction.
"A collection that begins with a turnip and ends with a young seal shows the surprise and originality of an award-winning poet in tune with nature and herself. An amazing compilation to enjoy in wonder and delight."~ Carol Smallwood
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Carol Smallwood received the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. She is the author of books of poetry, nonfiction.
Title: BLOOMING RED
Subtitle: Christmas Poetry for the Rational
Series: Celebration Series of Chapbooks
Author: Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Magdalena Ball
Publisher: Indy
Publisher Website Address: https://howtodoitfrugally.com
Author Email Address: HoJoNews@aol.com
ISBN-10: 1449948243
ISBN-13: 978-1449948245
ASIN: B004GXB4AW
Price: $5.95 Paperback, $2.99 Kindle
Page Count: 60 pages
Formats: PB, Kindle
Reviewed by Carolyn Wilhelm
Profound and moving poetry reflecting the reality of Christmas, which may not be that of commercials and photos. Early rising when the children are young, aching for those times when they are grown and perhaps have moved away. Howard-Johnson writes of the "echoes of foil tearing, and crushing of frail tissue." She writes the baby in the nativity set is always the first to go missing.
Publisher: Indy
Publisher Website Address: https://howtodoitfrugally.com
Page Count: 60 pages
Formats: PB, Kindle
Ball writes about how time is different for children, and "we touched each moment with tiny, trembling hands." She was a child six million years ago, according to one of her poems. She says, ". . . after hours at the mall, belief wears thin."
The poetry is so beautiful, and my review cannot begin to do justice to the writing. This is a book to read again and again. It is the right size to add to a holiday card and would make a perfect present.
More About the Reviewer
Carolyn Wilhelm reviews for Midwest Book Reviews and The New Book Review. She is a veteran educator who builds teaching aids for parents and teachers, many of them free and available on Pinterest. It is an especially valuable time during these long months of teaching via Zoom and working in isolated situations.
Ball writes about how time is different for children, and "we touched each moment with tiny, trembling hands." She was a child six million years ago, according to one of her poems. She says, ". . . after hours at the mall, belief wears thin."
The poetry is so beautiful, and my review cannot begin to do justice to the writing. This is a book to read again and again. It is the right size to add to a holiday card and would make a perfect present.
More About the Reviewer
Carolyn Wilhelm reviews for Midwest Book Reviews and The New Book Review. She is a veteran educator who builds teaching aids for parents and teachers, many of them free and available on Pinterest. It is an especially valuable time during these long months of teaching via Zoom and working in isolated situations.
The pace slows in the poem “when people look at me I want them to think, there’s one of those people,” an intimate elegy for Lou Sullivan, thought to be the first transgender man to publicly identify as gay.
Reiter shows their aptitude for given forms, dropping in odes (“Butternut squash, you are the War and Peace of vegetables”) and ghazals (“My body is the Tomb of the Unknown Penis”) to great effect. The penultimate poem in the book, “Transfag Semiotics,” is a mini-crown of sonnets, an extraordinarily crafted sequence where the speaker drills deep into their quest for identity:
Sometimes you vanish like a father
or a breast. Drop the handkerchief,
the theory, drop to your knees. Whether
you can explain it or not, do you want to live?
Faggot is becoming. What is a man?
I experienced what I wanted to understand.
It’s an absolute tour-de-force, and the comedic gestures fall away as Reiter grows deadly serious about the cost of becoming, of being made, and ultimately, what it means to authentically be.
In the current season of culture wars, where state legislatures are enacting “Don’t Say Gay” bills, and trying to reframe gender-affirming treatments as parental abuse, Made Man stands as a testament to the humanity of trans people everywhere. It’s also chock-full of intelligent, often hilarious and sometimes biting poems that will leave you spinning and exhilarated. Jump in, crank down your safety bar, and head out for the ride
Jendi Reiter (they/he) is the editor of WinningWriters.com is a prolific (and prolifically published!) poet. His New poetry collection! Made Man is from Little Red Tree Publishing. The American Library Association's Rainbow Round Table Reviews reports it is: "A mix of somber moments and charming wit, Reiter’s collection makes space for humor in the maelstrom of navigating gendered experiences."
"Things are not what they appear to be: nor are they
otherwise." --Surangama Sutra
IMPERFECT ECHOES
Subtitle: Writing Truth and Justice with Capital Letters, lie and oppression with Small
By Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Award from USA Book News
Available on Amazon as e-book or paper
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9781515232490
Reviewed by award-winning poet and memoirist Elizabeth Kirschner
Accepted for inclusion in Poets & Writers prestigious list of published poets, multi award-winning novelist and poet Carolyn Howard-Johnson is widely published in journals and anthologies. She is the recipient of the California Legislature’s Woman of the Year in Arts and Entertainment Award, and her community’s Character and Ethics award for her work promoting tolerance with her writing. She was also named to Pasadena Weekly’s list “Fourteen San Gabriel Valley women who make life happen” and was given her community’s Diamond Award for Achievement in the Arts. One of her poems won the Franklin Christoph poetry prize. She was an instructor for UCLA Extension’s world-renown Writers’ Program for nearly a decade. Learn more about all her books at http://bit.ly/CarolynsAmznProfile or http://howtodoitfrugally.com.
Review: Carolyn Howard’s poems in IMPERFECT ECHOES do articulate justice to the cleanly planed sentence carried across multiple lines. Incorrect to assume such sentences are reductive or simple. Unadorned sentences are an art, as in this one from Howard-Johnson’s poem, “Television for Children in the Seventies,” “she knows/Kermit as well as her Mother Goose/but mostly remembers/ body bags coming home.”
A self-proclaimed literary activist, Howard-Johnson wants the slipperiness of history, its tendency to drift into the haze of forgetfulness, to regain traction and agency, to have gravitas as a loci for instruction and an insistence for change. Here’s another telescopic line from “Nightmare,” which begins with an apocalyptic dream wherein “Wasps sense/the smell of horror, napalm,” and ends with the deftly ironic sentence, “now my grandson’s computer/skull logo on the snap-top//arrives by Fed-Ex wearing a skin of Iraqi dust.”
Carolyn Howard-Johnson is most effective when her decisively chosen un-grandiloquent diction is subtle with historical reference, particularly when it comes to the unenviable march of war after war, wars witnessed in her lifetime, as in the poem, “Perfectly Flawed,” “I settle into my uncle’s arms, he on his way to pilot B42’s./Something about about the Blitz, something I guess/must be related to lightning, to the undersides/of clouds tinged with fire.”
Another poem, “Drumbeat,” creates a staccato-rhythmic list by naming wars since the 20th century and ends by turning a question into a statement, which is one of poetry’s finer devices: “I with no idea/if remembering makes/things better or worse.” It mimics the way it is impossible to know what makes a sick infant feel better or worse. Possibly, Howard-Johnson is positing that our country is that sick infant.
Howard-Johnson doesn't solely address war, but allows herself to range from her native Utah to art and Background Singers as well as travel and mythology. If, as according to Williams, there is “no news but in poetry, then surely readers will find such news in IMPERFECT ECHOES.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Elizabeth Kirschner is a North Street Book Prize award-winning author of WAKING THE BONES, a memoir. Learn more about her at www.elizabethkirschner.com.Imperfect Echoes
Subtitle: Writing Truth and Justice with Capital Letters, lie and oppression with Small
By Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Award from USA Book News
Available on Amazon as e-book or paper
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9781515232490
Reviewed by award-winning poet and memoirist Elizabeth Krischner
Accepted for inclusion in Poets & Writers prestigious list of published poets, multi award-winning novelist and poet Carolyn Howard-Johnson is widely published in journals and anthologies. She is the recipient of the California Legislature’s Woman of the Year in Arts and Entertainment Award, and her community’s Character and Ethics award for her work promoting tolerance with her writing. She was also named to Pasadena Weekly’s list “Fourteen San Gabriel Valley women who make life happen” and was given her community’s Diamond Award for Achievement in the Arts. One of her poems won the Franklin Christoph poetry prize. She was an instructor for UCLA Extension’s world-renown Writers’ Program for nearly a decade. Learn more about all her books at http://bit.ly/CarolynsAmznProfile or http://howtodoitfrugally.com.
Review: Carolyn Howard’s poems in IMPERFECT ECHOES do articulate justice to the cleanly planed sentence carried across multiple lines. Incorrect to assume such sentences are reductive or simple. Unadorned sentences are an art, as in this one from Howard-Johnson’s poem, “Television for Children in the Seventies,” “she knows/Kermit as well as her Mother Goose/but mostly remembers/ body bags coming home.”
A self-proclaimed literary activist, Howard-Johnson wants the slipperiness of history, its tendency to drift into the haze of forgetfulness, to regain traction and agency, to have gravitas as a loci for instruction and an insistence for change. Here’s another telescopic line from “Nightmare,” which begins with an apocalyptic dream wherein “Wasps sense/the smell of horror, napalm,” and ends with the deftly ironic sentence, “now my grandson’s computer/skull logo on the snap-top//arrives by Fed-Ex wearing a skin of Iraqi dust.”
Carolyn Howard-Johnson is most effective when her decisively chosen un-grandiloquent diction is subtle with historical reference, particularly when it comes to the unenviable march of war after war, wars witnessed in her lifetime, as in the poem, “Perfectly Flawed,” “I settle into my uncle’s arms, he on his way to pilot B42’s./Something about about the Blitz, something I guess/must be related to lightning, to the undersides/of clouds tinged with fire.”
Another poem, “Drumbeat,” creates a staccato-rhythmic list by naming wars since the 20th century and ends by turning a question into a statement, which is one of poetry’s finer devices: “I with no idea/if remembering makes/things better or worse.” It mimics the way it is impossible to know what makes a sick infant feel better or worse. Possibly, Howard-Johnson is positing that our country is that sick infant.
Howard-Johnson doesn't solely address war, but allows herself to range from her native Utah to art and Background Singers as well as travel and mythology. If, as according to Williams, there is “no news but in poetry, then surely readers will find such news in IMPERFECT ECHOES.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Elizabeth Kirschner is a North Street Book Prize award-winning author of WAKING THE BONES, a memoir. Learn more about her at www.elizabethkirschner.com.
Carol Smallwood's "Thread, Form, and Other Enclosures" Reviewed by Cristina Deptula
Title: Thread, Form, and Other EnclosuresAuthor: Carol SmallwoodPublisher: Main Street Rag Press (October, 2020)ISBN: 978-1-59948-812-796 pages$15 (+ shipping)Purchase at http://mainstreetragbookstore.Reviewed by Cristina Deptula
On Christmas Day my mother and I enjoyed the most recent version of Little Women in the theater. I nodded with respect when Meg, the most domestic of the sisters, admonished the less traditional Jo, ‘Just because my dreams are different from yours doesn’t mean that they are less important.’
In her most recent poetry collection Thread, Form and Other Enclosures, Carol Smallwood illustrates Meg’s point through a thoughtful arrangement of pieces.
Formal structures—pantoum, triolet, and villanelle—begin the collection, immediately demonstrating the author’s technical prowess. Several of these pieces, and many works throughout Enclosures, deal with domestic objects and activities—quilts, blue jeans, sewing thread, Clabber Girl baking powder. There are even some gently humorous poems, such as a piece on how to discreetly hide one’s undergarments from neighbors who might see your clothesline and a highly structured piece written in upbeat advertising copy language about spandex yoga pants.
While Smallwood writes just as adeptly in free verse and shorter bursts of language later in the book, those formal pieces assert that homemaking, building an everyday life with skill and dignity, is a craft to be mastered, just as much as literature. My mother shared with me not long ago that when she and my father were newlyweds, he asked her why she found Woman’s Day and Good Housekeeping interesting. She told him that he read technology magazines to develop his career, and since at that point homemaking was her career, she was doing the same.
All of this affirms that traditional women’s concerns of cooking, sewing, and mending, and women themselves, are worthy of thought and consideration.
Smallwood’s collection is arranged so as to connect seemingly mundane activities to deeper meaning. Thread holds mended clothing and the squares of a quilt together, and a spool of thread from a woman, Ariadne, allowed Theseus to navigate his way out of the labyrinth after battling the Minotaur. On an even grander level, the ancient Greeks believed three goddesses, Fates, determined our lifespans by measuring and cutting thread. Strings, which can be seen as larger threads, are, in a leading cosmological theory, the building blocks of the universe.
Throughout human history women have invested labor and thought into nourishing people in the kitchen, taking pride in our appearance and that of our homes, creating beauty and order within our surroundings. To Smallwood, these endeavors are a real way of holding society together and laying down the building blocks of our world.
The domesticity Smallwood portrays can also represent enclosure, where women’s lives and contributions take place mostly within the home, the private rather than the public sphere. While women can certainly find meaning and beauty in homemaking, we can also find ourselves restricted by the metaphorical rooms, drawers and cabinets of our lives. Houses with heavy doors, and a husband who demeans and infantilizes, can wrap around and trap us, as Smallwood poignantly illustrates in the piece that references Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper, where isolation and loss of control over her life drives a female narrator to madness.
Women’s lives have often been marked by enclosure, whether by tradition, societal roles, or our understandable fears of assault and violence. Smallwood’s collection reflects some of this danger, through the aforementioned piece about the abusive husband and another about a male professor who makes crude comments in class.
Another kind of assault present in Smallwood’s collection is cancer, still treated by invasive chemotherapy that causes debilitating side effects. The speakers navigate and survive through a determined embrace, however possible, of freedom and choice. The cup that holds medication becomes a tool saved to capture and release insects trapped in the home, and one can consider the landscape of the Moon while receiving an ultrasound.
Smallwood's formal poetic structures, like the interiors of homes and the rooms, cabinets and boxes within them, represent both sites of beauty, mastery and empowerment and sites of restriction and confinement in women's lives. To reflect this contradiction, she employs a repetitive formal structure for a piece urging writers to throw off their inner censors and speak their minds.
We celebrate along with Smallwood when hair regrows and health returns after successful cancer treatment, as we do when the narrator gets away from the man who boasted she would never leave. Even when life leaves scars, we can sometimes survive, outlast our suffering and retain our beauty, become like the ‘three dolls in pink dresses, showing cracked faces with grace.’
Smallwood’s last two poems in the collection concern greeting card envelopes and McDonald’s, and she returns to formal structures to render these subjects. Her afterword reminds us that ‘beauty comes at us in ordinary moments/full-grown, unexpected.’ Everyday life can be inspiring and lovely, and we can understand the joy that Little Women’s Meg, and many women throughout history, have taken in the ‘threads and enclosures’ of our lives.
More About the Poet
Carol Smallwood edited several books for the American Library Asociation and is a National Federation of State Poetry Societies and Franklin-Christoph Poetry Contest Winner. Among her over five dozen books, Women and Poetry: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing by Successful Women Poets appears on the list of "Best Books for Writers" by Poets & Writers Magazine. Recent poetry collections are from WordTech Editions, Lamar University Press, Shanti Arts. Writing After Retirement: Tips by Successful Retired Writers; The Library's Role in Supporting Financial Literacy for Patrons; Library Partnerships With Writers and Poets. Compartments: Poems on Nature, Femininity, and Other Realms was nominated for the Pushcart Prize; others followed. Carol's first chapter of her novel, Lily's Odyssey, is in Best New Writing 2010; In the Measuring. Some of the Marquis publications she appears: Who's Who in the World, Who's Who of American Women, Who's Who in the World; Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. She appears in Contemporary Authors New Revision 282; Wikipedia. Carol has founded humane societies.More About the Reviewer
As a former science and technology reporter, Cristina Deptula brings curiosity and empathy to her book reviews. She has always loved to read and is the founder and editor of Synchronized Chaos International Magazine and also founder and general manager of Authors, Large and Small literary publicity firm.
Reviewed by Cristina Deptula
On Christmas Day my mother and I enjoyed the most recent version of Little Women in the theater. I nodded with respect when Meg, the most domestic of the sisters, admonished the less traditional Jo, ‘Just because my dreams are different from yours doesn’t mean that they are less important.’
In her most recent poetry collection Thread, Form and Other Enclosures, Carol Smallwood illustrates Meg’s point through a thoughtful arrangement of pieces.
Formal structures—pantoum, triolet, and villanelle—begin the collection, immediately demonstrating the author’s technical prowess. Several of these pieces, and many works throughout Enclosures, deal with domestic objects and activities—quilts, blue jeans, sewing thread, Clabber Girl baking powder. There are even some gently humorous poems, such as a piece on how to discreetly hide one’s undergarments from neighbors who might see your clothesline and a highly structured piece written in upbeat advertising copy language about spandex yoga pants.
While Smallwood writes just as adeptly in free verse and shorter bursts of language later in the book, those formal pieces assert that homemaking, building an everyday life with skill and dignity, is a craft to be mastered, just as much as literature. My mother shared with me not long ago that when she and my father were newlyweds, he asked her why she found Woman’s Day and Good Housekeeping interesting. She told him that he read technology magazines to develop his career, and since at that point homemaking was her career, she was doing the same.
All of this affirms that traditional women’s concerns of cooking, sewing, and mending, and women themselves, are worthy of thought and consideration.
Smallwood’s collection is arranged so as to connect seemingly mundane activities to deeper meaning. Thread holds mended clothing and the squares of a quilt together, and a spool of thread from a woman, Ariadne, allowed Theseus to navigate his way out of the labyrinth after battling the Minotaur. On an even grander level, the ancient Greeks believed three goddesses, Fates, determined our lifespans by measuring and cutting thread. Strings, which can be seen as larger threads, are, in a leading cosmological theory, the building blocks of the universe.
Throughout human history women have invested labor and thought into nourishing people in the kitchen, taking pride in our appearance and that of our homes, creating beauty and order within our surroundings. To Smallwood, these endeavors are a real way of holding society together and laying down the building blocks of our world.
The domesticity Smallwood portrays can also represent enclosure, where women’s lives and contributions take place mostly within the home, the private rather than the public sphere. While women can certainly find meaning and beauty in homemaking, we can also find ourselves restricted by the metaphorical rooms, drawers and cabinets of our lives. Houses with heavy doors, and a husband who demeans and infantilizes, can wrap around and trap us, as Smallwood poignantly illustrates in the piece that references Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper, where isolation and loss of control over her life drives a female narrator to madness.
Women’s lives have often been marked by enclosure, whether by tradition, societal roles, or our understandable fears of assault and violence. Smallwood’s collection reflects some of this danger, through the aforementioned piece about the abusive husband and another about a male professor who makes crude comments in class.
Another kind of assault present in Smallwood’s collection is cancer, still treated by invasive chemotherapy that causes debilitating side effects. The speakers navigate and survive through a determined embrace, however possible, of freedom and choice. The cup that holds medication becomes a tool saved to capture and release insects trapped in the home, and one can consider the landscape of the Moon while receiving an ultrasound.
Smallwood's formal poetic structures, like the interiors of homes and the rooms, cabinets and boxes within them, represent both sites of beauty, mastery and empowerment and sites of restriction and confinement in women's lives. To reflect this contradiction, she employs a repetitive formal structure for a piece urging writers to throw off their inner censors and speak their minds.
We celebrate along with Smallwood when hair regrows and health returns after successful cancer treatment, as we do when the narrator gets away from the man who boasted she would never leave. Even when life leaves scars, we can sometimes survive, outlast our suffering and retain our beauty, become like the ‘three dolls in pink dresses, showing cracked faces with grace.’
Smallwood’s last two poems in the collection concern greeting card envelopes and McDonald’s, and she returns to formal structures to render these subjects. Her afterword reminds us that ‘beauty comes at us in ordinary moments/full-grown, unexpected.’ Everyday life can be inspiring and lovely, and we can understand the joy that Little Women’s Meg, and many women throughout history, have taken in the ‘threads and enclosures’ of our lives.
Bobish by Magdelena Ball, a New Verse Memoir
Title: Bobish Author: Magdalena Ball
Author Website: http://www.magdalenaball.com
Publisher: Puncher & Wattmann (November 7, 2022)
Publisher: P.O. Box 279, Waratah NSW 2298 (Australia)
Publisher Website Address: https://puncherandwattmann.com/
Price $16.99 Paperback
Page count: 154 Pages
Formats: Paperback
ISBN: 1922571601
ISBN-13: 978-1922571601
Available on Amazon
Carolyn Wilhelm, reviewer
Bobish, by Magdelena Ball, is a new verse memoir published by Australian press Puncher & Wattmann. The poetic story follows the life of the author's great-grandmother, who was part of the mass diaspora of Jews from the Eastern European Shtetls to New York City. The book explores her experience as a Yiddish speaker in the garment industry where she worked in the ill-fated Triangle Shirtwaist factory. It continues through the two World Wars which, of course, impacted directly any family members left in her home town of Grodno (now in Belarus). Talented writer Ball transforms the life of her great-grandmother into a magical read. Though she was only fourteen years old, like many other Jews in Eastern Europe’s Pale of Settlement in 1907, Rebecca Lieberman gathered her few belongings and left for the United States. Alone. What follows is a unique and poetic story of history, war, mysticism, music, abuse, survival and transcendence against the back drop of New York City in the 20s, 30s, and 40s.
I am just taken with this book! Ball's poetry gives the immigration story a fresh new perspective (just when you think you have maybe read it all). Beautifully written, the words transcend the actual events and readers will even be reminded of their own family stories. How did Ball manage to recreate her great-grandmother's life into such a fantastic read? I do not know, but I am glad she did. Breathtaking! This will tug at my heart a long time. Do not miss this book!
Reviews may be found on Amazon, Goodreads, other online sites, and below.
'A fourteen-year-old girl is launched by pogroms and poverty into the New World, fearful and alone. How can she know that her great-granddaughter would weave her story, through imagination and a careful reading of history, into a poetic gift to her memory, and for many more generations to come?'
~ Ramona Koval
'Magdalena Ball’s powerful re-imagining of her great-grandmother’s life, from crossing the ocean in steerage, alone, at the age of fourteen, to the hardships of immigrant life in New York, is a vivid, lyrical portrayal of a woman that is as much an act of love as it is the preservation of a life, with its lessons of quiet courage in the face of crushing despair.' ~ Charles Rammelkamp
'The importance of remembering is a cornerstone of the Jewish faith and in this account of the author’s Jewish great-grandmother as she navigates her life of exile, each scene is both clear eyed and evocative, poetic and down to earth, empathetic and far reaching. A marvellous, nourishing book of resilience.' ~Judy Johnson
More About #TheNewBookReview Blog The New Book Review is blogged by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of the multi award-winning HowToDoItFrugally series of books for writers. Authors, readers, publishers, and reviewers may republish their favorite reviews of books they want to share with others. That includes authors who want to share their favorite reviews, reviewers who'd like to see their reviews get more exposure, and readers who want to shout out praise of books they've read and love. Please see submission guidelines in a tab at the top of this blog's home page or go directly to the submission guidelines at http://bit.ly/ThePlacetoRecycleBookReviews or to the guideline tab at the top of the home page of this blog. Authors and publishers who do not yet have reviews or want more may use Lois W. Stern's #AuthorsHelpingAuthors service for requesting reviews. Find her guidelines in a tab at the top of the home page, too. Carolyn Wilhelm is our IT expert, an award-winning author, a veteran educator and also contributes reviews and posts on other topics related to books. Reviews, interviews, and articles on this blog are indexed by genre, reviewers' names, and review sites so #TheNewBookReview may be used as a resource for most anyone in the publishing industry. As an example, writers will find this blog's search engine handy for gleaning the names of small publishers. Find other writer-related blogs at Sharing with Writers and The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor. #TheFrugalbookPromoter, #CarolynHowardJohnson, #TheNewBookReview, #TheFrugalEditor, #SharingwithWriters, #reading #BookReviews #GreatBkReviews #BookMarketing
SUBLIME PLANET
Earth’s day entry in the Celebration Series of chapbooks
by Magdalena Ball and Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Authors: Carolyn Howard-Johnson and Magdalena Ball
Authors' Web sites:
Carolyn: http://howtodoitfrugally.com/poetry_books.htm
Magdalena: http://magdalenaball.com
Photos: Ann Howley
ISBN: 978-1482054705
Gearing up for Earth Day, Carolyn Howard-Johnson and Magdalena Ball are releasing a brand new collection of poems titled Sublime Planet. The collection features relevant poems by Carolyn and Magdalena that demonstrate the interconnections of the world around us, including life, family, and love, along with the growing concern for the earth’s preservation.
This is a beautifully written collection that allows the reader to pause and take note of the world around her.
One of my favorite poems in the collection is one by Carolyn titled “The Giraffe:”
A tongue generous
as my head he reaches
for me, barriers no match
for his long neck, sniffs
my hair, kisses my face.
He unaware
he is endangered.
I unaware he might
be dangerous.
This poem is a powerful, yet simple tribute to a majestic creature that is now an endangered species. Can you imagine a planet without the giraffe?
Another poem in the collection that struck me is “Tipping Point” by Magdalena Ball: “[. . .] you eat and eat through four billion years of evolution now held loosely by one thread. [. . .] The future waits impatiently your decision.”
Again, powerful, and revealing.
Sublime Planet offers moving insight into the world around us and into a world that is in need of attention, and it certainly honors Earth Day. I highly recommend it.
For those who aren’t aware of what Earth Day is, Senator Gaylord Nelson created this special day in the spring of 1970. The purpose behind it was to make everyone aware of all the toxins being spewed into the air and dumped in nearby streams or other waterways by manufacturing companies.
At that time, there were no regulatory or legal safety nets to protect our planet, our environment. Senator Nelson took a stand and his cause quickly caught on.
The earth is our planet, our home, our responsibility, and we’re not doing such a good job protecting it.
Sublime Planet celebrates Earth Day (April 22nd).
The poems "Giraffe" and “Tipping Point” are from Sublime Planet, a book of poetry in the Celebration Series coauthored by Carolyn Howard-Johnson and Magdalena Ball. It will be released before Earth Day. In the meantime learn more about Carolyn's poetry books (including that Celebration Series!) at http://howtodoitfrugally.com/poetry_books.htm. And, learn more about Magdalena’s poetry and fiction at http://magdalenaball.com
About the reviewer:
Karen Cioffi is a multi-award-winning author, freelance/ghostwriter, and author online presence instructor. Give your writing and marketing efforts a boost with The Writing World newsletter. Get weekly tips and guidance, plus updates on free webinars, and TWO ebooks! Go to http://thewritingworld.com and sign-up today.
How to Tell a StoryAristotle, authorPhilip Freeman, translator Princeton University Press: http://press.princeton.edu
https://www.amazon.com/How-Tell-Story-Ancient-Storytelling/dp/0691205272
Highly Rated Translation of Aristotle's Poetics for Busy Authors--Finally!
Author Website: http://www.magdalenaball.com
Publisher: Puncher & Wattmann (November 7, 2022)
Publisher: P.O. Box 279, Waratah NSW 2298 (Australia)
Publisher Website Address: https://puncherandwattmann.com/
Price $16.99 Paperback
Page count: 154 Pages
Formats: Paperback
ISBN: 1922571601
ISBN-13: 978-1922571601
Available on Amazon
Carolyn Wilhelm, reviewer
Though she was only fourteen years old, like many other Jews in Eastern Europe’s Pale of Settlement in 1907, Rebecca Lieberman gathered her few belongings and left for the United States. Alone. What follows is a unique and poetic story of history, war, mysticism, music, abuse, survival and transcendence against the back drop of New York City in the 20s, 30s, and 40s.
I am just taken with this book! Ball's poetry gives the immigration story a fresh new perspective (just when you think you have maybe read it all). Beautifully written, the words transcend the actual events and readers will even be reminded of their own family stories. How did Ball manage to recreate her great-grandmother's life into such a fantastic read? I do not know, but I am glad she did. Breathtaking! This will tug at my heart a long time. Do not miss this book!
Reviews may be found on Amazon, Goodreads, other online sites, and below.
'A fourteen-year-old girl is launched by pogroms and poverty into the New World, fearful and alone. How can she know that her great-granddaughter would weave her story, through imagination and a careful reading of history, into a poetic gift to her memory, and for many more generations to come?'
~ Ramona Koval
'Magdalena Ball’s powerful re-imagining of her great-grandmother’s life, from crossing the ocean in steerage, alone, at the age of fourteen, to the hardships of immigrant life in New York, is a vivid, lyrical portrayal of a woman that is as much an act of love as it is the preservation of a life, with its lessons of quiet courage in the face of crushing despair.' ~ Charles Rammelkamp
'The importance of remembering is a cornerstone of the Jewish faith and in this account of the author’s Jewish great-grandmother as she navigates her life of exile, each scene is both clear eyed and evocative, poetic and down to earth, empathetic and far reaching. A marvellous, nourishing book of resilience.' ~Judy Johnson
Earth’s day entry in the Celebration Series of chapbooks
by Magdalena Ball and Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Authors: Carolyn Howard-Johnson and Magdalena Ball
Authors' Web sites:
Carolyn: http://howtodoitfrugally.com/poetry_books.htm
Magdalena: http://magdalenaball.com
Photos: Ann Howley
ISBN: 978-1482054705
Princeton University Press: http://press.princeton.edu
https://www.amazon.com/How-Tell-Story-Ancient-Storytelling/dp/0691205272
Jim Cox, Editor and Chief of Midwest Book Review gives me (and everyone else) permission to reprint the reviews he publishes in his glorious newsletter for writers (my words, not his! (-: ) I am particularly fond of this one because classic literature is rarely translated in a way the works well for our busy world. I you keep telling yourself that you would like to read this to benefit your own writing career, Jim and I think the time has finally come for you to do it!
Reviewed by Jim Cox for his Midwest Review newsletter and other Midwest publications
Synopsis: Handed down from ancient Greek literature, Aristotle's Poetics is arguably the most important book ever written for writers and readers of stories -- whether it be novels, short fiction, plays, screenplays, or nonfiction. Aristotle (384-322 BC) was the first to identify the keys to plot, character, audience perception, tragic pleasure, and dozens of other critical points of good storytelling. Despite being written more than 2,000 years ago, the Poetics remains essential reading for anyone who wants to learn how to write a captivating story -- or understand how such stories work and achieve their psychological effects.
Yet for all its influence, the Poetics is too little read because it comes down to us in a form that is often difficult to follow, and even the best translations are geared more to specialists than to general readers who simply want to grasp Aristotle's profound and practical insights.
With the publication of "How to Tell a Story: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Storytelling for Writers and Readers" ably translated into English for an American readership by Philip Freeman contemporary and aspiring authors and readers are provided with the most readable translation of the Poetics ever yet produced, making it an indispensable handbook that is more accessible, engaging, and useful than ever before.
In addition to its inviting and reliable translation, a commentary on each section, and the original Greek on facing pages, this edition of "How to Tell a Story: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Storytelling for Writers and Readers" features unique bullet points, chapter headings, and section numbers to help guide readers through Aristotle's unmatched introduction to the art of writing and reading stories.
Critique: A complete course of Aristotelean instruction that is impressively 'reader friendly' in organization and presentation, "How to Tell a Story: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Storytelling for Writers and Readers" must be considered essential reading by anyone aspiring to write stories that would be successfully attractive to an author's intended audience. This splendid edition from the Princeton University Press is unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, community, college, and university library Literary Studies collections and as a textbook for creative writing workshops curriculums.
It should be noted for the personal reading lists of students, academia, aspiring (and experienced) writers that "How to Tell a Story: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Storytelling for Writers and Readers" is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $9.99).
Editorial Note #1: Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Lyceum, the Peripatetic school of philosophy, and the Aristotelian tradition.
Editorial Note #2: Philip Freeman is the author of more than twenty books on the ancient world, including the Cicero translations How to Think about God, How to Be a Friend, How to Grow Old, and How to Run a Country (all from Princeton University Press). He also holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Humanities at Pepperdine University.
Alex Phuong Reviews Carol Smallwood's Poetry
Title: Patterns
Subtitle: Moments in Time
Author: Carol Smallwood,. Cincinnati, Ohio
Genre: Poetry,
2019, 103 pp.,
$19.
Purchase on Amazon
Review by Alex Phuong originally for BookSmugglersDen
One of the most interesting features of life is patterns that exist all around the world. Clever designs prepend artistic merit to an otherwise mundane life. After all, life without vivacity is oftentimes monotonous. Patterns help people connect with one another because of the universal and fundamental fact that everything is interconnected because of the diversity that defines the world and its inhabitants. Therefore, Carol Smallwood's newest poetry collection, entitled, Patterns: Moments in Time, once again explores the sublime nature of reality that reveals how life can be truly extraordinary.
Smallwood organizes her poetic masterpieces with a prologue, three sections, and an epilogue that create a gestalt-like collection that proves that the entirety of her collection as a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Within the prologue, Smallwood addresses how “Driving Into Town” offers the idea of embarking on the mystical journey known as life itself. Life has been compared to traveling on a road that can be a bumpy ride metaphorically, but Smallwood suggests that reality can be like a cabaret, or as she puts it, “a cocktail party” (4). The classiness of an elegant party compares life to an experience that must be felt to enjoy what life can offer any given person. Therefore, Carol Smallwood immediately establishes her assertion that “moments in time” must be enjoyed since time is limited.
Smallwood reiterates the importance of time by acknowledging the cyclical nature of life. Her poem entitled, “A Dawn Trio” reveals how life operates like clockwork. Specifically, she capitalizes the phrases, “Dawn Comes” (1), “My Hands” (5), and “Every Morning” (17). The structure of this poem is similar to the doctrine of the Trinity because devout Christian believers believe that the purpose of life is serving with humility. Even though the “Dawn Comes” (1) daily, human hands must perform good work to add significance to an otherwise bland existence. The phrase “Every Morning” (17) emphasizes the fact that people who enjoy life will be able to “recall home” (24) since Earth itself is the only home. This “Dawn Trio” figuratively creates the daily circadian lifestyle that defines human existence and emphasizes how there is beauty in every day even though all people encounter bad days. Therefore, this powerful poem with a structured pattern suggests that life itself is beautiful no matter how bad life may seem.
The second part of this poetry collection, entitled, “In the Observing” demonstrates how people could observe patterns in both the natural world and their daily lives by simply looking around with their eyes. Patterns do exist in the world, and sometimes these patterns exist just because they exist. Specifically, the poem entitled “Carl Sagan Called Our Planet” openly exhibits one of the most puzzling questions about existence, which is, “what makes water blue?” (4). Smallwood then attempts to answer that question by reminding readers that young children might also ask, “why the sky's blue?” (6). This reply suggests that some patterns in the world might exist so that there is no need for an explanation. Maybe patterns exist just because they do, and all of the patterns in the world help create decorative elegance within an otherwise harsh and painful existence. Life can definitely be challenging, but big questions oftentimes have no easy answers, and should instead just be accepted for what it is (just like knowing life and loving life for what it is).
The third section and epilogue of Patterns: Moments in Time emphasize the eponymous phrase through symbolic poetry. The third part is called, “Connections” and it contains poems that beautifully explore how patterns reveal the aestheticism within everything in the world and in life. Specifically, the poem “Select Moments” is actually similar to another poetry collection by Carol Smallwood, which is called A Matter of Selection. This beautiful poem contains the stanza "Surely if I stood tall as possible / Long enough, tried hard enough / there'd come some hints, some pattern? (18-20). The rhetorical question that concludes this poem directly relates to the importance of demonstrating sincere effort to live a meaningful life. Life itself is a matter of choices, as explored in A Matter of Selection, but Carol Smallwood uses this stanza to reveal how people would sometimes pursue their dreams while also confronting the anxiety associated with what the future holds. Sometimes choices lead to unintentional consequences, but that just shows how life is a process. People might make poor choices sometimes, but Smallwood suggests that there is no need to fret over making mistakes because of patterns that result from cause and effect. Therefore, causes and effects are essentially patterns that form from human behavior. Such an insightful examination of the way people act within moments in time ultimately create the patterns that exist all around them as they make choices based on their own matters of selection.
Carol Smallwood is truly a profound poet. Her previous poetry collections delve deep into what it means to be alive, which is what most writers hope to achieve when they create their own original works of written art. Smallwood's poetry offers insight into the connections that people in have along with their relationships with the world around them, and ultimately the entire universe itself. In Hubble's Shadow explores how people are compared to the unfathomable universe, and A Matter of Selection reveals how choices, both good and bad, really do determine the future. Once again, Carol Smallwood examines how human behavior establish patterns based on decisions they make within moments in time. Therefore, she has achieved fame as one of the most gifted and prolific authors in contemporary writing. Through simplicity and profundity, Smallwood's poetry examines what it means to be alive with audacity. Life itself is short anyways, so why not treasure moments in time? Carol Smallwood once again writes poetry that will hopefully inspire readers to re-examine what truly is beautiful in the world.
THE DENSITY OF COMPACT BONE by Magdalena Bal
Jim Cox, Editor and Chief of Midwest Book Review gives me (and everyone else) permission to reprint the reviews he publishes in his glorious newsletter for writers (my words, not his! (-: ) I am particularly fond of this one because classic literature is rarely translated in a way the works well for our busy world. I you keep telling yourself that you would like to read this to benefit your own writing career, Jim and I think the time has finally come for you to do it!
Reviewed by Jim Cox for his Midwest Review newsletter and other Midwest publications
Synopsis: Handed down from ancient Greek literature, Aristotle's Poetics is arguably the most important book ever written for writers and readers of stories -- whether it be novels, short fiction, plays, screenplays, or nonfiction. Aristotle (384-322 BC) was the first to identify the keys to plot, character, audience perception, tragic pleasure, and dozens of other critical points of good storytelling. Despite being written more than 2,000 years ago, the Poetics remains essential reading for anyone who wants to learn how to write a captivating story -- or understand how such stories work and achieve their psychological effects.
Yet for all its influence, the Poetics is too little read because it comes down to us in a form that is often difficult to follow, and even the best translations are geared more to specialists than to general readers who simply want to grasp Aristotle's profound and practical insights.
With the publication of "How to Tell a Story: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Storytelling for Writers and Readers" ably translated into English for an American readership by Philip Freeman contemporary and aspiring authors and readers are provided with the most readable translation of the Poetics ever yet produced, making it an indispensable handbook that is more accessible, engaging, and useful than ever before.
In addition to its inviting and reliable translation, a commentary on each section, and the original Greek on facing pages, this edition of "How to Tell a Story: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Storytelling for Writers and Readers" features unique bullet points, chapter headings, and section numbers to help guide readers through Aristotle's unmatched introduction to the art of writing and reading stories.
Critique: A complete course of Aristotelean instruction that is impressively 'reader friendly' in organization and presentation, "How to Tell a Story: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Storytelling for Writers and Readers" must be considered essential reading by anyone aspiring to write stories that would be successfully attractive to an author's intended audience. This splendid edition from the Princeton University Press is unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, community, college, and university library Literary Studies collections and as a textbook for creative writing workshops curriculums.
It should be noted for the personal reading lists of students, academia, aspiring (and experienced) writers that "How to Tell a Story: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Storytelling for Writers and Readers" is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $9.99).
Editorial Note #1: Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Lyceum, the Peripatetic school of philosophy, and the Aristotelian tradition.
Editorial Note #2: Philip Freeman is the author of more than twenty books on the ancient world, including the Cicero translations How to Think about God, How to Be a Friend, How to Grow Old, and How to Run a Country (all from Princeton University Press). He also holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Humanities at Pepperdine University.
Alex Phuong Reviews Carol Smallwood's Poetry
Title: Patterns
Subtitle: Moments in Time
Author: Carol Smallwood,. Cincinnati, Ohio
Genre: Poetry,
2019, 103 pp.,
$19.
Purchase on Amazon
Review by Alex Phuong originally for BookSmugglersDen
One of the most interesting features of life is patterns that exist all around the world. Clever designs prepend artistic merit to an otherwise mundane life. After all, life without vivacity is oftentimes monotonous. Patterns help people connect with one another because of the universal and fundamental fact that everything is interconnected because of the diversity that defines the world and its inhabitants. Therefore, Carol Smallwood's newest poetry collection, entitled, Patterns: Moments in Time, once again explores the sublime nature of reality that reveals how life can be truly extraordinary.
Smallwood organizes her poetic masterpieces with a prologue, three sections, and an epilogue that create a gestalt-like collection that proves that the entirety of her collection as a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Within the prologue, Smallwood addresses how “Driving Into Town” offers the idea of embarking on the mystical journey known as life itself. Life has been compared to traveling on a road that can be a bumpy ride metaphorically, but Smallwood suggests that reality can be like a cabaret, or as she puts it, “a cocktail party” (4). The classiness of an elegant party compares life to an experience that must be felt to enjoy what life can offer any given person. Therefore, Carol Smallwood immediately establishes her assertion that “moments in time” must be enjoyed since time is limited.
Smallwood reiterates the importance of time by acknowledging the cyclical nature of life. Her poem entitled, “A Dawn Trio” reveals how life operates like clockwork. Specifically, she capitalizes the phrases, “Dawn Comes” (1), “My Hands” (5), and “Every Morning” (17). The structure of this poem is similar to the doctrine of the Trinity because devout Christian believers believe that the purpose of life is serving with humility. Even though the “Dawn Comes” (1) daily, human hands must perform good work to add significance to an otherwise bland existence. The phrase “Every Morning” (17) emphasizes the fact that people who enjoy life will be able to “recall home” (24) since Earth itself is the only home. This “Dawn Trio” figuratively creates the daily circadian lifestyle that defines human existence and emphasizes how there is beauty in every day even though all people encounter bad days. Therefore, this powerful poem with a structured pattern suggests that life itself is beautiful no matter how bad life may seem.
The second part of this poetry collection, entitled, “In the Observing” demonstrates how people could observe patterns in both the natural world and their daily lives by simply looking around with their eyes. Patterns do exist in the world, and sometimes these patterns exist just because they exist. Specifically, the poem entitled “Carl Sagan Called Our Planet” openly exhibits one of the most puzzling questions about existence, which is, “what makes water blue?” (4). Smallwood then attempts to answer that question by reminding readers that young children might also ask, “why the sky's blue?” (6). This reply suggests that some patterns in the world might exist so that there is no need for an explanation. Maybe patterns exist just because they do, and all of the patterns in the world help create decorative elegance within an otherwise harsh and painful existence. Life can definitely be challenging, but big questions oftentimes have no easy answers, and should instead just be accepted for what it is (just like knowing life and loving life for what it is).
The third section and epilogue of Patterns: Moments in Time emphasize the eponymous phrase through symbolic poetry. The third part is called, “Connections” and it contains poems that beautifully explore how patterns reveal the aestheticism within everything in the world and in life. Specifically, the poem “Select Moments” is actually similar to another poetry collection by Carol Smallwood, which is called A Matter of Selection. This beautiful poem contains the stanza "Surely if I stood tall as possible / Long enough, tried hard enough / there'd come some hints, some pattern? (18-20). The rhetorical question that concludes this poem directly relates to the importance of demonstrating sincere effort to live a meaningful life. Life itself is a matter of choices, as explored in A Matter of Selection, but Carol Smallwood uses this stanza to reveal how people would sometimes pursue their dreams while also confronting the anxiety associated with what the future holds. Sometimes choices lead to unintentional consequences, but that just shows how life is a process. People might make poor choices sometimes, but Smallwood suggests that there is no need to fret over making mistakes because of patterns that result from cause and effect. Therefore, causes and effects are essentially patterns that form from human behavior. Such an insightful examination of the way people act within moments in time ultimately create the patterns that exist all around them as they make choices based on their own matters of selection.
Carol Smallwood is truly a profound poet. Her previous poetry collections delve deep into what it means to be alive, which is what most writers hope to achieve when they create their own original works of written art. Smallwood's poetry offers insight into the connections that people in have along with their relationships with the world around them, and ultimately the entire universe itself. In Hubble's Shadow explores how people are compared to the unfathomable universe, and A Matter of Selection reveals how choices, both good and bad, really do determine the future. Once again, Carol Smallwood examines how human behavior establish patterns based on decisions they make within moments in time. Therefore, she has achieved fame as one of the most gifted and prolific authors in contemporary writing. Through simplicity and profundity, Smallwood's poetry examines what it means to be alive with audacity. Life itself is short anyways, so why not treasure moments in time? Carol Smallwood once again writes poetry that will hopefully inspire readers to re-examine what truly is beautiful in the world.
THE DENSITY OF COMPACT BONE by Magdalena Bal
In Celebration of Father's Day
Author
Sculpting the Heart with Art Therapy
Read Now - http://bit.ly/d1jGLN
Twitter - @wjoycewhite
FIRE ON HER TONGUE
Subtitle: An eBook Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry
Editors: Agodon, Kelli Russell, and Spaulding-Convy, Annette
Editor’s Website Link: http://www.ofkells.blogspot.com/
ISBN-13: 978-1-937860-24-0Two Sylvias Press, 2012
E-bookReviewed by Paul David Adkins
E-book
Kristin Johnson Reviews Poetry Chapbook For and About Mothers
By Magdalena Ball and Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Poetry Chapbook
Purchase: www.budurl.com/MotherChapbook
Reviewed by Kristin Johnson, founder of The Warrior Poet Project
What relationship is more complex or more elemental than the mother-child bond? Abraham Lincoln said, 'All that I am or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.' Toni Morrison wrote, 'Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that suppose to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing.'
Both of those quotes, as well as one by Honore de Balzac at the beginning of SHE WORE EMERALD THEN, perfectly describe this collection of poems by Carolyn Howard-Johnson and Magdalena Ball---poetry that catches at your soul. Both of them reprise their poems from Ball's QUARK SOUP, Howard-Johnson's Tracings, and their joint collection, Cherished Pulse. Fans of Cherished Pulse will be pleased to learn that the poets continue to write poems that don't sound either like banal Hallmark cards or the bitter-at-dysfunctional-family jeremiads that habitually torture MFA writing workshop participants.
The two poets complement each other (with words accompanied by stunning photography by May Lattanzio). The opus covers both the grand sweep of the birth of all universal life and the private universe populated by only an adult daughter watching her mother struggle to eat dinner and remembering how her mother washed her one slip.
While Ball explores the cosmic continuum and traces us all back to the mother spark that set the stars burning, Howard-Johnson concentrates her portraiture on the deeply personal. But Ball also talks about the oxytocin haze of giving birth and her mother vomiting from cancer drugs. To quote the last poem in the collection, 'Hallmark Couldn't Possibly Get This Right.' When you read about the tough love of the universe or Ball's sienna childhood photograph or Howard-Johnson's mother forgetting her name, you want to cry and hug your mother (and your children, if you have them), because they capture the eternal tug of war between joy and sorrow in the mother-child bond."
---
Kristin Johnson is a poet, author, screenwriter and founder of the Poet Warrior Project, http://poetwarriorproject.blogspot.com
Moods of Motherhood: Thirty poems by award-winning poets Magdalena Ball and Carolyn Howard-Johnson, with original photography by May Lattanzio. A beautifully presented, tender, and strikingly original gift book, ideal for Mother's Day or any day when you want to celebrate the notion of motherhood in its broadest sense.
IMPERFECT ECHOES
IMPERFECT ECHOES do articulate justice to the cleanly planed sentence carried across multiple lines. Incorrect to assume such sentences are reductive or simple. Unadorned sentences are an art, as in this one from Howard-Johnson’s poem, “Television for Children in the Seventies,” “she knows/Kermit as well as her Mother Goose/but mostly remembers/ body bags coming home.”
A self-proclaimed literary activist, Howard-Johnson wants the slipperiness of history, its tendency to drift into the haze of forgetfulness, to regain traction and agency, to have gravitas as a loci for instruction and an insistence for change. Here’s another telescopic line from “Nightmare,” which begins with an apocalyptic dream wherein “Wasps sense/the smell of horror, napalm,” and ends with the deftly ironic sentence, “now my grandson’s computer/skull logo on the snap-top//arrives by Fed-Ex wearing a skin of Iraqi dust.”
Carolyn Howard-Johnson is most effective when her decisively chosen un-grandiloquent diction is subtle with historical reference, particularly when it comes to the unenviable march of war after war, wars witnessed in her lifetime, as in the poem, “Perfectly Flawed,” “I settle into my uncle’s arms, he on his way to pilot B42’s./Something about about the Blitz, something I guess/must be related to lightning, to the undersides/of clouds tinged with fire.”
Another poem, “Drumbeat,” creates a staccato-rhythmic list by naming wars since the 20th century and ends by turning a question into a statement, which is one of poetry’s finer devices: “I with no idea/if remembering makes/things better or worse.” It mimics the way it is impossible to know what makes a sick infant feel better or worse. Possibly, Howard-Johnson is positing that our country is that sick infant.
Howard-Johnson doesn't solely address war, but allows herself to range from her native Utah to art and Background Singers as well as travel and mythology. If, as according to Williams, there is “no news but in poetry, then surely readers will find such news in IMPERFECT ECHOES.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Elizabeth Kirschner is a North Street Book Prize award-winning author of WAKING THE BONES, a memoir. Learn more about her at www.elizabethkirschner.com.
ABOUT THE POET
Accepted for inclusion in Poets & Writers prestigious list of published poets, multi award-winning novelist and poet Carolyn Howard-Johnson is widely published in journals and anthologies. She is the recipient of the California Legislature’s Woman of the Year in Arts and Entertainment Award, and her community’s Character and Ethics award for her work promoting tolerance with her writing. She was also named to Pasadena Weekly’s list “Fourteen San Gabriel Valley women who make life happen” and was given her community’s Diamond Award for Achievement in the Arts. One of her poems won the Franklin Christoph poetry prize. She was an instructor for UCLA Extension’s world-renown Writers’ Program for nearly a decade and edits poetry books for others. Learn more about all her books including her newest, Imperfect Echoes, at http://bit.ly/CarolynsAmznProfile or http://howtodoitfrugally.com
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