“Persuasive” Woman Drinking Absinthe explores “Illicit Love” in New Review from Compulsive Reader
Charles Rammelkamp delivers a witty and erudite review of Katherine E. Young's opus.
In his new review of Katherine E. Young's Woman Drinking Absinthe, Charles Rammelkamp delivers a write-up worthy of its subject. With careful erudition, and no lack of wit, he mines Katherine's beautiful and heartbreaking poesy about "illicit love" for words of affirmation.
"Love, indeed, is the overarching theme of this remarkable collection," writes Charles. And he shows how this recurring theme speaks throughout the book, pointing to the "conflict between marriage and desire," in the early poems, the link between "sex and violence" in poems like "Bluebeard," and the "demimonde of women in the midst of affairs of the heart" as in "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" and many others.
In these depictions, Charles writes that, "Woman Drinking Absinthe is unflinchingly honest and lyrical."
Read the entire review here.
Earth Day Reflections: To See for the First Time
“Our communications are profuse and immediate, as is our consciousness of the interrelationship of all that exists. We’ve seen what we often leave in our wake—homeless populations, spoiled wilderness. We can see the way the decisions and investments that we make, here, everyday, can effect just how much milk a baby in Uganda gets. Our world is a teeming, mysterious, multi-cultural mousetrap of a place where everything seems to hinge on something else. We share a new concept of this planet as a finite space, dense, and more difficult than ever to navigate. We live in an environment fraught with hazard, and it is important to have good guides, guides with insight—those who tread softly.”
Joanna Biggar’s Picks for NPM (Week 3)
Week three of National Poetry Month is here and we are still celebrating! So as the champagne continues relentlessly foaming for party-goers catching their tipsy mid-air, we asked author, Joanna Biggar, to select three poems she thinks are worthy of applause between wassails.
James J. Patterson’s Picks for NPM (week 2)
In honor of National Poetry Month, We asked author and essayist extraordinaire, James J. Patterson, to select three poems he’d like to see celebrated. Along with Walt Whitman’s “On the Beach at Night Alone” (featured above), he chose Wordsworth’s “The World is too much with Us”, And Last but not least, the famed American Poet Robert Bly performing the poem “On Being a Man” by the famed Spanish poet, Antonio Machado.