Hazen Discusses the Comforts of Poetry in Uncertain Times
In a guest post on The Bookworm, Elizabeth Hazen, author of "Girls Like Us," discusses the power of reading and writing poetry in uncertain times.
In a guest post for the small book review blog, The Bookworm, Elizabeth Hazen discusses the role poetry occupies in her life during uncertain times as with the 2016 inauguration and #MeToo movement, and now the COVID 19 epidemic. She also explains her relationship to her new collection Girls Like Us.
While in her first collection, Chaos Theories, she used "a filter through which to explore my subjects allow[ing her] the distance to be objective," in Girls Like Us Hazen "[didn't' allow [herself] quite as much distance from the subject," adding that:
"After the public discourse about sexual assault and misogyny blew up with Trump’s inauguration and with the onset of #MeToo, many old hurts resurfaced for me, as they did for so many women I know. I had to write through all of this and realized that many poems I had been working on were really about what it is to be a woman in world that expects us to be so many contradictory things. The process of writing these poems, though painful at times, was incredibly empowering, and it is my hope that readers will share in that sense of empowerment."
Read the full blog post HERE
And don't forget, EVERY. SINGLE. BOOK. in the ASP catalog is half-price through the month of may!
Featured Audio: Mark A. Pritchard Reads More from “Billy Christmas”
“We have things to discuss” the Christmas tree says to Billy in the dark of the living room after bemoaning its fairy light binds. Billy’s mother is sick in bed, his father is missing, and the pine tree he was given by the charitable proprietor of his local stand is about to thrust him into a magical adventure which will color forevermore how he thinks about family and what it means to be an adult. Hear Mark A. Pritchard dramatize this important scene from his novel, Billy Christmas.
ASP Author’s Gift Guide for Book Lovers (PART 2)
Gift guide part 2 features Mysteries, Travel Writing, and Books about Northern California.
ASP Authors’ Gift Guide for Book Lovers
Well, it’s that time of year again, when holiday gift lists are popping up all over. Here at ASP HQ, we’re particularly interested, of course, in gifts for book-lovers, and we’ve noticed a curious fact: No matter how diverse the sources of these lists, a few titles pop up again and again. Usually these are recently published, widely reviewed best-sellers. While there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, gift-givers might find themselves putting one more copy of the current hot mystery, or history, or memoir under a book-loving friend’s tree.