Veteran Poet Releases New Book from Poetic Matrix Press

  A Matter of Selection

 by Carol Smallwood
Publisher:Poetic Matrix Press (March 5, 2018)

Paperback:120 pages

ISBN-10:0998146986
Available on Amazon 
$17



Carol Smallwood, 
a whole battery of poetry chapbooks to her credit, has written another 
masterpiece.  By that, I don't mean something utterly impossible to
decipher or something that reminds the reader of poets' sonnets from her

11th grade English Literature class.  Many of the poems in Smallwood's 
A Matter of Selection are just as intricate, just as formulated. The thing is, 
you won't notice unless you make them into a puzzle to be unraveled 
or refigured like a Rubic's cube. And why would you want to do that?

Smallwood
writes intricate poems that are easy--even lazy. We read them for the spell
they create, the nostalgia, the wonder. Each is like images in the
opening poem: A melody. Morning fog. A path. 

Smallwood's
repetitive line, " . . . it makes sense to cut up pieces to sew with needle and
thread" in her poem "The Universe" lets her unraveling of the cosmos
be understood with subtle sounds. "Read," "bed," and, yes "dread." You
won't need a reviewer to tell you not to sweat it. You'll just go with the
gentle flow. 

Smallwood's 
A Matter of Selection are poems all the better in the moment. Save
analytics for another time, another chapbook another text. Like a child
listening to her mother's voice, no need to analyze. 

MORE ABOUT THIS BLOG

 The New Book Review is blogged by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of the multi award-winning HowToDoItFrugally series of books for writers. Of particular interest to readers of this blog is her most recent How to Get Great Book Reviews Frugally and Ethically (http://bit.ly/GreatBkReviews ) that covers 325 jam-packed pages covering everything from Amazon vine to writing reviews for profit and promotion and a whole lot you didn't know including how to use blurbs from reviews to sell books to catalogs. Reviewers will have a special interest in the chapter on how to make reviewing pay, either as way to market their own books or as a career path--ethically! 

This blog 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.

Literary Journal Shares Carol Smallwood Poetry Review

Interweavings
By Carol Smallwood
Shanti Arts Publishing, Brunswick, ME.
2017
ISBN 978-1-941830-46-8 
paperback, $16.95, 162 pages.


Reviewed by Kathrine C Aydelott, MLIS, PhD., Dimond Library, University of New Hampshire originally for Big Muddy: A journal of the Mississippi River, Fall, 2017

As Lynn Z Bloom writes in “Living to Tell the Tale: The Complicated Ethics of Creative Nonfiction,” “Because writers of creative nonfiction are dealing with versions of the truth, they—perhaps more consistently than writers in fictive genres—have a perennial ethical obligation to question authority, to look deep beneath the surface, and an aesthetic obligation to render their versions of reality with sufficient power to compel readers’ belief” (278). Carol Smallwood brings us into her world, shares her perspective, and we believe her.

Smallwood, well known in library circles for her volumes on libraries and librarianship, including ALA published titles Library Management Tips that Work (2011), and Bringing the Arts into the Library (2014), is also widely acclaimed for her poetry, in titles such as Compartments: Poems on Nature, Femininity, and Other Realms (2016), which was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and for the well received In Hubble’s Shadow (2017).

She is as adept at creative nonfiction, as demonstrated by her recent volume, Interweavings (2017), a series of forty-three short essays, separated into seven categories: Visits, The Feminine Side, A Sense of Place, A Backward Look, Things Literary, Strands, and Observations. Conversational and sometimes intimate in tone, the book reads easily, like letters from a friend. The essays are often very short, almost to the point of being sketches, and like musical refrains, elements brought up in one story circle back again later in the collection, tying the whole together.

Libraries, texts, and learning are prominent in these essays and it’s clear that Smallwood has a deep love for words, for education, for science, and for books. But for me, the motif of time passing predominated my readings. In retirement, Smallwood has moved to a small college town from a larger city, and her private thoughts and public encounters center around moments of connection and disconnection, of nostalgic looking backwards and of the necessary moving forward. Smallwood is on the cusp of the rest of her life, and many of the familiar elements of society are taking new shapes in the face of war, technology, aging, and of transition generally. Like Sarah Orne Jewett’s nineteenth-century short stories of Maine, or Virginia Woolf’s twentieth-century musings in Mrs. Dalloway, in Smallwood’s work we see a familiar world coming to an end and a fragile new era about to begin.


For example, in the first essay, “The Library Visit,” Smallwood, writing this time in the third-person, is struck, Alice-like, by a college campus’s renovation of a traditional institution. The building’s newness makes her feel foreign in a familiar place. The library itself is in a period of transition. If the books “didn’t have the answers, they’d done their best,” and the reference area is “deserted” (16).  The “psychedelic” carpet evoked the seventies, while the technology of the expanding bookshelves “encouraged a wariness of being smashed when you walked between them” (20). In Woolfian stream-of-consciousness, asking herself questions discursively, she muses on the architecture inside and the environment outside, all while the library’s new atrium windows evoke a beautiful panopticon, where all of nature is staring back at her, beckoning the author in spite of the rain, to return to an arena that is familiar and unchanging.



Thinking in snippets of lyric language, Smallwood both locates the reader in the present and simultaneously makes clear that there is a discomfiture of time and place. A feminine zeitgeist predominates. In the essay “Women and Time,” Smallwood remarks that “Perhaps their monthly cycles give women an accurate sense (call it intuition) that everything is in flux as they revolve on a planet that’s still forming” (40). As such, Smallwood’s details depict everything as new, and we enter the author’s mind that is observant in all of the senses.



Although her tone is often gentle and wistful, the author travels lightly along in the current of change. In “Karen’s Visit,” she thinks her friend’s voice “had such sadness in it that I wanted to show her it was possible to have dreams” (33). In “Women and Time” Smallwood even admits that “Time is an illusive, slippery, chimerical companion, exasperating to understand especially as one gets older and no closer to finding wisdom long thought to accompany age” (40-41).



Some of the essays are ultimately too short and read more like blog entries than finished pieces. I would have been happy if many of these had been longer, as it is a pleasure to spend time with the author as she considers her life’s triumphs, her reading, and her memories. The strongest essays are in the beginning, I feel, in Visits, where the writing shines and the words are most compelling. But don’t overlook the final essay, “They Will Come,” which masterfully closes the volume. This essay speaks of spring, and renewal, and here Smallwood acknowledges what she does not know, and is confident in the ambiguity. She states, “Yes, I will capture spring this year. Or, like aging, will it be too gradual and immense to grasp?” (159). Interweavings is an attempt to understand what it means to age, in all of its gradations and immensity. 


Philip Gerard, in Creative Nonfiction, defines the genre as “stories that carry both literal truthfulness and a larger Truth, told in a clear voice, with grace, and out of a passionate curiosity about the world” (208). Carol Smallwood’s writing epitomizes this definition.





1.     Bloom, Lynn Z. “Living to Tell the Tale: The Complicated Ethics of Creative Nonfiction.” College English, vol. 65, no. 3, 2003, pp. 276–289. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3594258.



2.     Gerard, Philip. Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life. Cincinnati: Story, 1996.











MORE ABOUT THIS BLOG 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.

Jendi Reiter Reviews Em Jollie's Poetry

 Field Guide to Falling
 by em jollie
Website https://www.facebook.com/emjollie
Genre - Poetry
ISBN-10: 0997347201
ISBN-13: 978-0997347203
Name of reviewer - Jendi Reiter
Published in Reiter's Block, Jendi's blog -
Link to buy book - best to buy directly from emjollie@gmail.com but also available on Amazon

Reviewed by Jendi Reiter originally for her blog, Reiter's Block

Western Massachusetts writer em jollie’s new poetry collection A Field Guide to Falling (Human Error Publishing, 2017) is like a stained-glass cathedral window: even in scenes of suffering, the glorious colors give joy and uplift. Much of the book processes the aftermath of breaking up with a beloved woman, though at the end, the narrator seems to find a new beginning with another partner and a greater sense of herself as complete and sufficient. But this therapeutic summary can’t do justice to the mystical meaning of her journey. The speaker bravely walks up to the edge of everything we consider permanent, looks into the clouds swirling above the bottomless gulf, and finds a way to praise their ever-changing shapes. These poems imply that the value of falling–in love, out of love, out of Eden into a world of loss–is in how it challenges us to keep our hearts open, to say Yes despite it all.

Specificity keeps these classic themes fresh. A lesser poet would risk pathos with the extended metaphor of “How to Set a Firefly Free” as a farewell to a relationship where love exists but is not enough. This poem works because it is a real firefly first, a symbol second.

Firefly, suddenly setting aflame cut crystal hanging
from ceiling fan pull-chain. Greenish glow in each facet
while all night dogwood salts dark-wet sidewalk
flowers ripped gloriously open in rainpour.

Isn’t that a love poem all by itself? Those “flowers ripped gloriously open” already remind you of your own worthwhile heartbreak, whatever that was. The ending, which makes the personal connection explicit, only confirms what you felt it was about from the very first lines.

…If only
I didn’t know why lightning bugs blink.
If only I wasn’t so wise to the fact that your light
does not belong to me, will not ever.
If only I didn’t know that was right.

So naturally I just Googled why lightning bugs blink. Wikipedia says the trait originally evolved as a warning signal to predators that the bug was toxic to eat, but now its primary purpose is to communicate with potential mates. This dual meaning of sex and death confirms the speaker’s sad verdict on this love affair, which earlier in the poem she compared to the bond between a neighbor and his snarling dog: “[w]e said they were so mean they belonged together. Yet there/was something sweet about the belonging.”

jollie has one stylistic tic that I understand is common to the Smith College “school” of poetry, which is the occasional (and to my mind, random) omission of “a” and “the”. I’m sorry to say this is a pet peeve of mine. It creates a missing beat in the rhythm of a sentence, which distracts me. It’s fine to twist grammar to make a more compressed line, but I feel that this works best when the entire poem is written in an unusual voice, not when a single part of speech is excised from otherwise normal English.

jollie has kindly allowed me to reprint the poems below. It was hard to choose just two! Buy her book here.

Object Constancy

Sand can be grasped in a palm, yes. But wind
will take it eventually. Heart is body’s hourglass,
holding its own beginning
& end, its constant ticking tipping moment into
granular moment, for a while. You could take my skull
in your hands, but you will have to give it back
at some point. As will I.

Sure, Freud’s nephew came to understand
that Teddy Bear was just over edge of crib when it
disappeared from sight. But where is that Teddy now,
if not in some museum, curators desperately
fighting its inherent impermanence? Presence has to be
interrogative, doesn’t it, rather than declarative?
Dust is still dust. What I mean is: how
do I trust more than what I learned in the chaos
of childhood when since then I’ve been ingrained with loss
upon loss, like every human walking wings of light
through time?

Feather the paintbrush of my fingers across your jaw.
Feather the paintbrush of your fingers across my jaw.
We color each other for this moment. Just this one.
Then it’s done, days like hungry teeth devouring
endless could-have-beens into the finite sacred what-was.
I say: I love you (I have no choice)
What I mean to say: I let go (I have no choice)

****
A Few Desires, or How to Hunger

I want to be the malleable soap
your hands sculpt as you cleanse yourself,
as ordinary and as daily and as caressed as that.

I want to be the cutting board, that firm surface
you can lay edges against, that allows you
to divide roughage from nourishment.

I want to be the pillow case, containing all
the softness for resting your public face
and the slim canvas you play your private dreams onto.

Let me suds into joining the stream of water
down the drain, become the bamboo board
oiled so many times until finally, split, I am

placed on the compost pile. Let the laundry
tear my threads until, like the pillow case,
I cannot contain, but let every thriving thing seep out.

But in truth I can be none of these things,
just this tiny self loving you, accepting your gifts,
providing what sustenance I can in return.

In other words, use me up, until I am done with myself.

MORE ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Jendi Reiter is a poet, novelist,  and principal of the essential WinningWriters.com where she often judges for their sponsored poetry contests. She also blogs at Reiter's Block. Find quotations from Rumi in many of her signatures:  

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"There is a morning inside you, waiting to burst into light."
~ Rumi

MORE ABOUT THIS BLOG

 The New Book Review is blogged by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of the multi award-winning HowToDoItFrugally series of books for writers. Of particular interest to readers of this blog is her most recent How to Get Great Book Reviews Frugally and Ethically (http://bit.ly/GreatBkReviews ). This blog 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.

Magdalena Ball's Poety Sees Science Everywhere

Unmaking Atoms

By Magdalena Ball
Genre: Poetry/ Science
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Ginninderra Press (January 11, 2017)
Language: English
190 Pages
ISBN-10: 1760412821
ISBN-13: 978-1760412821
Author's Web site: www.magdalenaball.com
Buy the book  on Amazon

A Moment in Time

I always learn something new from Magdalena Ball’s poetry and was excited that she has a new book that might satisfy my hunger for more of her science-related poems. And so I was surprised to see an entire section titled “Hieroglyphics” in Unmaking Atoms. That discovery doubled my excitement because years ago I studied Egyptian hieroglyphics for three long, confusing, and exciting semesters. It was a process that entangled me in anything with even the mildest scent of Egypt about it and I have visited that country several times since. But I was confused. Where was the “science” in anything I had ever learned about that country, its history, culture, people, language?

I’m telling you this story because Ball’s poetry is nothing if not eclectic and wholly unexpected. I should have known she could make the connection. In this section inspired by the Online at MoMA exhibition at

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/online/#works, she says,

“the story you’ve left in me

a ridge against the inside

scar tissue

“like art, I could make myself in positive integers

on carbon, memory cutting figures across a black expanse

as I move through these places, at grand scale

“finding a tincture of who you were

each detail of your absence, bringing back

the line and curve that makes us whole.”

And so . . . now I have a deeper sense of many of those things I thought I had come to know. And science?  Ball finds science everywhere and—of course—it is everywhere

And this, dear readers, is the beauty and the excitement of picking up a book of Ball’s poetry and slowly, deliberately, letting that science permeate you awareness of whatever she chooses to examine.

You won’t be bored. You will have your senses awakened. And those who know and love ekphrastic poetry are going to fall in love and want more of the modern art exhibit that inspired it.

Isn’t all poetry but a moment in a time? And isn’t science inundated with unseen time. Ball may help you see time—and feel it.

MORE ABOUT THIS BLOG

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.

Imperfect Echoes

Subtitle: Writing Truth and Justice with Capital Letters, lie and oppression with Small

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson

Web site Link: http://howtodoitfrugally.com

Honored by USA Book News

Genre: Poetry

ISBN-13:978-1515232490

ISBN-10:1515232192

To buy as either paperback or e-book: http://bit.ly/ImperfectEchoes r%2Caps%2C272

Cover art by Richard Conrad Jackson

Reviewed by Helen Dunn Frame

Five Star Review on Amazon:

Review:

I’m not a poet and I know it. However, Carolyn Howard-Johnson is as evidenced by her latest work Imperfect Echoes Writing Truth and Justice with Capital Letters, lie and oppression with Small. She found inspiration for her poems in a variety of lengths in a wide range of topics garnered from news stories, photographs, events and more. Her style is distinctive. You’re bound to find poems that strike a chord in your life. Be sure to read the section at the end of the book, “About the Author” to learn about this fabulous woman.

About the reviewer:

Look for Helen Dunn Frame’s fourth book, Wetumpka Widow, Murder for Wealth, in paperback and Kindle on Amazon soon. Her other books are Retiring in Costa Rica or Doctors, Dogs and Pura Vida (Second Edition); Greek Ghosts; and Secrets Behind the Big Pencil, Inspired by an Actual Scandal. Find out more about her here: Author’s Page: http://www.amazon.com/Helen-Dunn-Frame/e/B0054LDOBW
Website: http://bit.ly/1KxXt7T  Facebook: http://on.fb.me/1COtMJn Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/grandi1369/   and LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-dunn-frame

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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.

Robert Medak Reviews Award-Winning Imperfect Echoes

Title: Imperfect Echoes
Subtitle: Writing Truth and Justice with Capital Letters, lie and oppression with Small
Author: Carolyn Howard – Johnson
ISBN: 9781515232490
Finalist USA Book News Award
Available on Amazon as an e-book or paperback
Five-Star review from Robert Medak

Reviewed by Robert Medak

Imperfect Echoes is a series of poems by Carolyn, and a look at simple things in our lives that many don’t take the time to find the joy in their lives.

In this book, Carolyn draws with words allowing the reader to reminisce, if you are old enough, about living a life before social media and texting.

Through Carolyn’s way with words, readers are transported to times and places painted though the use of words on a page as a painter uses brushes to paint on canvas.

As you read Imperfect Echoes, you are able to reflect and reminisce about experiences, places and people from our planet.

Have a few moments to spare? Read a poem from Imperfect Echoes, it is not a book you have to read cover to cover in one sitting, although, you could. It is about the visceral response elicited by the poems.

Imperfect Echoes, is a book even those who don’t like poetry will enjoy reading and experiencing the written word in the form of free verse.

Imperfect Echoes is a five-star recommended read for anyone who likes a good book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Medak is a freelance writer, blogger, editor, reviewer and marketer. Learn more about him at:
http://www.authorsden.com/robertmedak
http://rjmedak.wordpress.com
http://twitter.com/freelancewrtr
http://www.linkedin.com/in/bobmedak

http://xeeme.com/RobertMedak

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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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.

Award-Winning Memoirist Reviews Imperfect Echoes

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

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 20^th 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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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.

Editor of Bookwatch Calls Poet "Exceptionally Skilled Wordsmith"

Imperfect Echoes

Subtitle: Writing Truth and Justice with Capital Letters, Lie and Oppression with small
Author: Carolyn Howard-Johnson

Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9781515232490

$9.95, PB, 

148pp, 

Purchase: http://bit.ly/ImperfectEchoes

Web site: http://HowToDoItFrugally.com/poetry_books.htm
Also available for Kindle and other e-readers.

Reviewed by Jim Cox for the February 2016 Issue of Wisconsin Bookwatch

Accepted for inclusion in Poets and Writers prestigious list of published poets, multi award-winning novelist and poet Carolyn Howard-Johnson is widely published in journals and anthologies. With the publication of "Imperfect Echoes: Writing Truth and Justice with Capital Letters, Lie and Oppression with Small" Carolyn has showcased the best of her free verse poetry to date. An exceptionally skilled wordsmith, her poetry will linger in the mind and memory long after the book itself has been finished and set back upon the shelf. Very highly recommended for community and academic library Contemporary American Poetry collections, it should be noted for personal reading lists that "Imperfect Echoes" is also available in a Kindle edition ($2.99). 

'Utah's Song'
Snow hums a quiet melody, rhythmic drifts, 
polar staccato on cheeks and nose. 
Quiet harmony here. 
Solace in the pulse of canyon winds, 
hush of gurgling creeks 
sway of clouds moving high. 
Symphony of silence
in thin mountain air. 
Bars, staffs, and whole notes.
Tranquil self-destruction.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Jim Cox is Editor-in-Chief of  Wisconsin Bookwatch. He has been a staple in the review industry for decades. . His business address is 278 Orchard Drive, Oregon, WI 53575 and his business e-mail is MWBOOKREVW@aol.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. Learn more about her and follow her Amazon Author page at http://bit.ly/CarolynsAmznProfile or at http://howtodoitfrugally.com/more_on_imperfect_echoes. 

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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.

Title: Imperfect Echoes

Subtitle: Writing Truth and Justice with Capital Letters, lie and oppression with Smal
Author: Carolyn Howard-Johnson
HowToDoItFrugally Publishing

Artwork by Richard Conway Jackson
www.howtodoitfrugally.com
TheFrugalEditor.blogspot.com
9781515232490, $9.95, 148pp,

Buy at Amazon, http://bit.ly/ImperfectEchoes

Reviewed by Jim Cox, editor-in-chief of Midwest Book Review for the poetry shelf of his Small Press Bookwatch

Synopsis: "Imperfect Echoes: l" is a work that was inspired by Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz's poem "Incantation" that lauds the power of human reason over the reoccurring and seemingly insane political realities. In "Imperfect Echoes", author Carolyn Howard-Johnson holds out hope but is not persuaded by trends that seem worse now than they were in Milosz's time. A student of Suzanne Lummis, UCLA poetry instructor and the Fresno School of Poetry fronted by US poet laureate Philip Levine, Carolyn touches on the isms of the world--racism, ageism, even what might be termed "wallism" but was once referred to as xenophobia. In her poem "Crying Walls," she sounds a low warning reminiscent of Robert Frost: "Chains linked. Wire barbed,/ Krylon smeared. Feeble,/ useless, unholy billboards,/ anything but mending walls."

Critique: Carolyn Howard-Johnson is articulate, gifted, insightful, iconoclastic, and a truly impressive literary talent. "Imperfect Echoes: Writing Truth and Justice with Capital Letters, lie and oppression with Small" is an inherently fascinating, thoughtful, and thought-provoking read that is very highly recommended for community and academic library Contemporary Poetry collections. For personal reading lists it should be noted that "Imperfect Echoes" is also available in a Kindle edition ($2.99).

MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Learn more about the author at http://howtodoitfrugally.com.

She blogs at http://TheFrugalEditor.blogspot.com and http://SharingwithWriters.blogspot.com.

Network with her at

Facebook: http://Facebook.com/carolynhowardjohnson
Twitter: http://Twitter.com/FrugalBookPromo
Pinterest: http://Pinterest.com/chowardjohnson

LinkedIn: http://LinkedIn.com/carolynhowardjohnson

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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.