Thursday, June 29, 2023
Cat Thursday - We will never truly understand
Friday, June 23, 2023
Flare, Corona by Jeannine Hall Gailey - Review
I feel like I read quite a bit of poetry, and I'm always amazed by how much a new collection touches me. This is a wonderful collection. In her poems, Gailey shares her personal journey, touches on current events and nature (our dying planet). I loved the "Self-Portrait As..." poems. As a fan of speculative fiction, I appreciated the elements of science fiction, fantasy and even horror. I really enjoyed the nod to witches in "Grimoire."
I felt "I Can't Stop" in my soul. "I can't stop thinking of the Doomsday Clock, how close we are to spinning into the black hole at the center of the galaxy." Does she know me?
Oh my goodness, "A Story for After a Pandemic" is one of the most beautiful poems I've ever read. Maybe it's because the pandemic affected me (everyone) so profoundly. I'm just not the same person I was before the pandemic. A little more frightened, a lot less social. "After the pandemic, we will rejoin at the river's edge, at the waterfalls and seasides, like animals. Praise the ocean, the sky, the stars: what doesn't protect us, what remains, what holds us together."
As I said, a wonderful collection of poems. Very highly recommended!
Against a constellation of solar weather events and evolving pandemic, Jeannine Hall Gailey’sFlare, Corona paints a self-portrait of the layered ways that we prevail and persevere through illness and natural disaster.
Gailey deftly juxtaposes odd solar and weather events with the medical disasters occurring inside her own brain and body— we follow her through a false-alarm terminal cancer diagnosis, a real diagnosis of MS, and finally the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. The solar flare and corona of an eclipse becomes the neural lesions in her own personal “flare,” which she probes with both honesty and humor. While the collection features harbingers of calamity, visitations of wolves, blood moons, apocalypses, and plagues, at the center of it all are the poet’s attempts to navigate a fraught medical system, dealing with a series of challenging medical revelations, some of which are mirages and others that are all too real.
In Flare, Corona, Jeannine Hall Gailey is incandescent and tender-hearted, gracefully insistent on teaching us all of the ways that we can live, all of the ways in which we can refuse to do anything but to brilliantly and stubbornly survive.
Jeannine Hall Gailey is a writer with MS who served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She is the author of five books of poetry: Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist's Daughter, Field Guide to the End of the World, the winner of the Moon City Press Book Award and the SFPA's Elgin Award, and upcoming in 2023, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions. She also wrote a non-fiction book called PR for Poets to help poets trying to promote their books. Her poems have been featured on NPR's The Writer's Almanac and on Verse Daily; two were included in 2007's The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. She was awarded a 2007 and 2011 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize for Poetry and a 2007 Washington State Artist Trust GAP grant. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Ploughshares.
Thursday, June 22, 2023
Cat Thursday - Sometimes mean, and great at hiding
Check this out:
Today I Learned': 15 Pawsome Fun Facts And Stories About Cats
Friday, June 16, 2023
Classics Club Spin #34
And the spin landed on #13...The Werewolf by Montague Summers
I'm thrilled!
Failed miserably last time. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Motto of my life.
- Mastering Witchcraft - Paul Huson
- Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol
- Where Angels Fear to Tread - E.M. Forster
- Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
- The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
- Murder in the Cathedral - T.S. Eliot
- As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
- Vampires and Vampirism - Montague Summers
- Taras Bulba - Nikolai Gogol
- The Centaur - Algernon Blackwood
- The Collector - John Fowles
- The Devils of Loudon - Aldous Huxley
- Werewolf - Montague Summers
- Grendel - John Gardner
- The Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux
- Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
- The Human Chord - Algernon Blackwood
- In Search of Dracula: The History of Dracula and Vampires - Raymond T. McNally, Radu R. Florescu
- The Witch of Ravensworth - George Brewer
- The House on the Borderland - William Hope Hodgson
Thursday, June 15, 2023
Cat Thursday - Precious and silly at the same time
We lost Alice two years ago on June 13.
Still missing her every day.
Still missing her every day.
Thursday, June 8, 2023
Cat Thursday: Authors and Cats (120) - Jirō Osaragi
The second Cat Thursday of each month is Authors and Cats Thursday. Each time I will feature an author, pictured with their/a cat(s), or guest posts by cat loving authors who also (sometimes) write about cats.
I apologize for not posting last week. I kid you not, by the time I remembered, it was already Friday! Guess it's time to set a weekly reminder.
The Osaragi Jirō Memorial Museum in Yokohama, Japan is dedicated to the author Jirō Osaragi and features numerous cat ornaments as an integral part of its feline-themed decor. Osaragi wrote several novels connected to Yokohama, including Gento (Magic Lantern) and lived at the Hotel New Grand for over 10 years (in room 318). It's often said that the Shōwa-period author cared for over 500 cats throughout his lifetime at his home in Kamakura, Japan—which is sometimes open to the public. Visitors can lounge on Osaragi's terrace and sip tea while picturing the hundreds of semi-feral cats that once frolicked in the gardens.
Monday, May 29, 2023
portraits of red and gray: memoir poems by James C. Morehead - Review
I had to laugh at Four Summers in Florida (82-83-84-85) because he really captured what we GenXers are always saying...
1982
I spent my teenage summers working in Florida, living alone, programming computers. That forty years ago, when parents let their sons fly two thousand miles south, from Toronto to Florida, to live alone, and program computers all summer.
I was fifteen and couldn't drive, so I brought a hand-me-down bike with saddlebags for carrying groceries. That was forty years ago when parents let their sons live alone, without a car, two thousand miles away. At least my parents did, I can't speak for other parents.
...our parents really didn't care what we did back then. I could tell some stories of my own, I kid you not.
This collection is a must-read. I learned so much about a person and a life in these lines, verses, and prose. The final poem, lost (and found) just gets getting older, our forgetfulness, and that slow (but is it slow?) march to the end.
these things we lose track of
About the Poet:
James Morehead is Poet Laureate of Dublin, CA. portraits of red and gray is his second collection, and he hosts the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast. James’ poem “tethered” was transformed into an award-winning animated short film, “gallery” was set to music for baritone and piano, and his poems have appeared in numerous publications. He is currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
...our parents really didn't care what we did back then. I could tell some stories of my own, I kid you not.
This collection is a must-read. I learned so much about a person and a life in these lines, verses, and prose. The final poem, lost (and found) just gets getting older, our forgetfulness, and that slow (but is it slow?) march to the end.
these things we lose track of
a puzzle piece clinging to a sweaty forearm
an unpaid bill the anniversary card bought last week
a ring of keys all tucked away too safely
i worry most of all about the pages
ripped from a daily calendar on my desk
then crumpled and thrown away
one day closer to a final tear
See what I mean? Again, a must-read.
About the book:
Take an unforgettable journey from the Cold War USSR to Savery, Wyoming, from the mountains of Tuscany to the peak of Yosemite’s Half Dome, from the Canadian wilderness to the beaches of Normandy. James Morehead’s (Poet Laureate – Dublin, California) acclaimed collection is built around a series of memoir poems that takes readers into pre-perestroika Soviet Union through the eyes of a teenager, from Moscow to Tbilisi to Leningrad (and many stops in-between). The striking cover, designed by Zoe Norvell, is based on a 1982 lithograph by Igor Prilutsky.
Advance Praise:
“In this second collection of poems, James Morehead’s imagery is vivid, spare and elemental, and it is consistently chosen and arranged to achieve intensely poetic effects. The rhythmic control is impeccable. The centerpiece of this collection, a long series of poems that chronicle a trip through the former Soviet Union, is a fast moving, impressionistic feast of imagery. Sunglasses, denim shirts, vodka debauches, dollars, rubles, steely-eyed Russian authorities ever on the lookout for forbidden deals – all of it is transparent and engaging.” – Carmine Di Biase, Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus – Jacksonville State University
“In portraits of red and gray by James C. Morehead we travel with him through boyhood and manhood: camping with his dad, working in his high school years far away from home every summer, his time as a teen in Russia traveling during spring break with his school. The vulnerability and humanity expressed in these poems is moving. Morehead writes, ‘…I had to wait / for my tears to dry before dropping in quarters to call home.’” – Angie Trudell Vasquez, Author and Madison, WI, Poet Laureate
“In portraits of red and gray by James C. Morehead we travel with him through boyhood and manhood: camping with his dad, working in his high school years far away from home every summer, his time as a teen in Russia traveling during spring break with his school. The vulnerability and humanity expressed in these poems is moving. Morehead writes, ‘…I had to wait / for my tears to dry before dropping in quarters to call home.’” – Angie Trudell Vasquez, Author and Madison, WI, Poet Laureate
James Morehead is Poet Laureate of Dublin, CA. portraits of red and gray is his second collection, and he hosts the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast. James’ poem “tethered” was transformed into an award-winning animated short film, “gallery” was set to music for baritone and piano, and his poems have appeared in numerous publications. He is currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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