Rose Solari Reviews Four Poetry Collections Dealing with Grief
Solari's anticipated monthly poetry column in the Washington Independent Review of Books dropped today. She tackles four new collections by women poets dealing with grief.
This month, Rose Solari's column for the Washington Independent Review of Books looks at three shining new collections from new and established poets, as well as the best of Jane Kenyon. Each collection, in a way, deals with grief (from her review):
"Grief is a perennial subject for poets, and for good reason: In making art out of our losses, we not only memorialize our dead but can, with luck and skill, sing or speak our way into healing. Four new collections by women poets all revolve, in one way or another, around grief and its aftermath. Each offers poetry of exploration, catharsis, and even consolation."
The four collections reviewed this month are:
Allison Benis White's The Wendys (from the fantastic independent press, Four Way Books)
Jil Bialosky's Asylum: A Personal, Historic, Natural Inquiry in 103 Lyric Sections
Lesley Wheeler's The State She's In (from another wonderful small press, Tinderbox Editions)
Poet Jane Kenyon and editor Donald Hall's The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon (from Graywolf)
Check out Rose Solari's live show "Rose Reads" every Wednesday at 4pm EDT on her Facebook Page.
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.
Featured Poetry: “Burial at Shanidar” by Elizabeth Hazen
This is no modern tradition, says Elizabeth Hazen. It is not only now that humans ornament their dead with flowers. “See,” she says in her rumination on tradition and humanity, Burial at Shanidar, “Even from a distance we dream of gardens where there should be stone.” And on Christmas especially, it is so wonderful to curl up with a book of poetry, even to read out-loud to one’s family, and bask in the ways we make words, just like the long winter days of dark, meaningful with light and tradition.