Free Christmas E-Book for Thoughtful E-Greetings

Blooming Red
Subtitle: Christmas Poetry for the Rational
Authors: Magdalena Ball and Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Awards from USA Best Books and Military Writers Society of America
ISBN: 9781449948245
Free copy available at http://amzn.to/BloomingRedKindle
Dates Freebie is Available: Dec. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18.

 

 

Multi award-winning poets Carolyn Howard-Johnson and Magdalena Ball figure nothing is more meaningful at any holiday than a poem—a real poem, not sing-songy impersonal verse from the shelves of card shops. They also noticed that many folks remember many people they forgot when it may be too late.

 Ta Da! We have are offering you our "rational" Christmas chapbook to procrastinators free. Enter the KDP Select free e-book feature. All you do is go to http://amzn.to/BloomingRedKind on Dec. 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18 and click.

 

Anyone can send it free to anyone they'd like to have a thoughtful—and fast—Christmas gift with a click of a mouse (no not the same mouse that's in "The Night Before Christmas" poem!). The booklet Blooming Red: Christmas Poetry for the Rational was honored by the Military Writers Society of America and USA Book News award.

 

It's a mini gift and greeting card in one!

 

Blooming Red includes Maggie’s science-inspired and Carolyn’s nostalgic poetry. It also includes some humorous poems for fair measure.

 

Magdalena Ball runs the highly respected CompulsiveReader.com review site.  She is the author of the poetry book Repulsion Thrust, which was published to unanimous 5-star reviews.  Her novel Sleep Before Evening was a Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist and she just released a new novel set in Australia. It is Black Cow.  

Carolyn Howard-Johnson's poetry appears frequently in review journals. She is listed in Poets & Writers and her chapbook of poetry, Tracings (www.budurl.com/CarolynsTracings ), was given the Award of Excellence by the Military Writers Society of America and She Wore Emerald Then won its highest honor of gold. One of her poems recently won the Franklin Christoph Poetry Prize. She is also an award-winning novelist and short story writer and instructor for UCLA Extension Writers' Program.

For more information on any of the chapbooks in the Celebration series, contact either of the authors, or visit media rooms at www.howtodoitfrugally.com or  www.magdalenaball.com. To learn more about artist Vicki Thomas and to see her selections of her work, go to http://www.vickithomasartist.com .

 

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Please pass this offer on to your friends. Support material available electronically or by post on request from Magdalena Ball maggieball@compulsivereader.com

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The New Book Review is blogged by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of the multi award-winning HowToDoItFrugally series of books for writers. It is a free service offered to those who want to encourage the reading of books they love. 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. Please see submission guidelines on the left of this page. Reviews and essays are indexed by genre, reviewer names, and review sites. Writers will find the 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.

Margaret Fieland Reviews Christmas Poetry Chapbook

Blooming Red : Christmas Poems for the Rational
By Carolyn Howard-Johnson and Magdalena Ball
Poetry Chapbook
ISBN 9781449948245
Buy Link: www.budurl.com/BloomingRed

Reviewed by Margaret Fieland

Looking for a holiday stocking stuffer? Want something to read aloud at holiday dinners, something the whole family can enjoy? Then treat yourself to is delightful collection by poetic collaborators Carolyn Howard-Johnson and Magdalena Ball.This is a delightful little volume, 58 pages consisting of thirteen poems by each poet. I love reading poetry aloud, and this volume is full of delight. A couple of favorites:
Christmas Magic Wrought by Google's Keyword Elves by Carolyn Howard-Johnson.
begins with:

At the stroke of dawn on November first
gremlins tired from their Halloween

and ends with:


That's when Google's
keyword elves gave me the gift of all

Christmas gifts. It's called
the make-dinner-reservations

-at-McCormick-and-Schmick
system of revenge.

You're sure to recognize yourself in this holiday tale of woe. The poor narrator is having a hard time at the holidays.. Ants attack her turkey, the oven thermometers are on the fritz and the Kitchen Aid has died just as its warranty runs out. And are more disasters to come. I laughed but, like the narrator, we, too, have contemplated just chucking the whole thing and going out to a restaurant.


And another, this one by Magdalena Ball - fond memories, Six Million Years Ago, when we were kids:


Six million years ago
when we were just kids
upright in thin desert air
bi-pedaling in anticipation
of holiday seasons yet to come.
Time was different then.

and ends:

the first law of thermodynamics
what cannot be created or destroyed
your burning
youthful
matter.

Do yourself a favor, and create some memories of your own by buying this book and then sharing it with the whole family over the holidays.

About the reviewer:Born and raised in New York City, Margaret Fieland has been around art and music all her life. She is an avid science fiction fan, and selected Robert A. Heinlein's Farmer in the Sky for her tenth birthday, now long past. In spite of making her living as a computer software engineer, she turned to one of her sons to format the initial version of her website, a clear illustration of the computer generation gap. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Melusine, Front Range Review, and All Rights Reserved. Her book, The Angry Little Boy, will be published by 4RV Publishing, LLC, in early 2013. You may visit her website, http://www.margaretfieland.com.




----- The New Book Review is blogged by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of the multi award-winning HowToDoItFrugally series of books for writers. It is a free service offered to those who want to encourage the reading of books they love. 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. Please see submission guidelines on the left of this page. Reviews and essays are indexed by genre, reviewer names, and review sites. Writers will find the 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. As a courtesy to the author, please tweet and retweet this post using this little green retweet widget :

New Christmas Chapbook in Celebration Series

Blooming Red

Subtitle: Christmas Poetry for the Rational
By Magdalena Ball & Carolyn Howard-Johnson
ISBN 9781449948245

Reviewed by Joyce White for Amazon
Award winning and happily espoused poets, Carolyn Howard-Johnson and Magdalena Ball, have teamed up once again, to help celebrate their love of the holidays with their new book of poetry, Blooming Red. Carolyn is the Frugal Book Promoter and the Frugal Editor. You can find Maggie at the popular Compulsive Reader.

Carolyn and Maggie work together virtually as Carolyn lives in California and Maggie lives in Australia. It fascinates me how these two poets team up and get the best out of each other. Each contributed 13 individual poems to this festive holiday collection of wit, family charm, and myth. If you’re wondering, they also collaborated on Cherished Pulse, She Wore Emerald Then, and Imagining the Future in the same way. All can be found at Amazon.com. Both of these women enjoy a common interest in celebrating their sexuality and sensuality in poetry during the holidays.

Carolyn experimented with abstract and form in her poetry, and some of her one-liners, are:

“Christmas is always a surprise package…no one wants to decorate a tree pushing a star to the top of a 14-foot high vaulted ceiling…”

“Christmases all to soon pass us by as others laid claim to our progeny…”

“we have more time to think…to write…to remember while “all the gremlins and ants…cleverly disappear until it is Christmas time again…”

Carolyn turned to Google to help her find an anteater to adopt or rent out for the holiday…Google’s keyword elf gave [her] the best gift of all Christmas gifts…the idea of making-dinner-reservations…out!

Carolyn writes “Natures best gifts and ours never silent…blessed by no human sound.”

Reading these two award winners is like partaking in their womanhood, tasting their femininity, and meeting their past head on. Their poems cry out for their inner child who still wants Santa to come visit them, you know…equality for all; and, I agree with Carolyn who says “[in] Einstein’s less than balanced world…we would be less than dead.”

Maggie writes of abundance and waste, of gluttonous dyspepsia…of the inability to digest joy when others are hungry, what cannot be created or destroyed…a huge database of Christmas past (found in the attic)…random messy knowledge curse of recall becoming parcels he could leap…with only one present leading him to greatness…with anticipation turning to memory before weeping eyes…a house full of dreams, visions and desires, each glass ball becoming a wish, taken from the tree of life we decorate at Christmas…super connections pulsing, through the anti-matter of your tired brain, wrought with nostalgia and wrung through time’s dryer…Once the paper’s gone, it’s just us again, tired, spent, remembering life…one tap of the keyboard a newbie springs forth…no sacrifices in blood here…this is a rational zone so many years on fertile.
Make your holiday great and read your family Blooming Red. It is a great holiday stuffer! Fun and Informal. Five Stars from me. Merry Christmas to everyone!

The reviewer is the author of Sculpting the Heart Book Reviews (http://www.sculptingtheheart.com/) and two books, Sculpting the Heart’s Poetry and Sculpting the Heart: Surviving Depression with Art Therapy, http://www.wingedforarttherapy.com/.


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The New Book Review is blogged by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of the multi award-winning HowToDoItFrugally series of books for writers. It is a free service offered to those who want to encourage the reading of books they love. 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. Please see submission guidelines on the left of this page. Reviews and essays are indexed by genre, reviewer names, and review sites. Writers will find the 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. As a courtesy to the author, please tweet and retweet this post using this little green retweet widget :