Review: Natural Voices: Celebrating Nature With Opened Eyes

A lovely collection of poetry and prose focused on nature,

Natural Voices: Celebrating Nature With Opened Eyes was published as a multi-faceted project. First, it created a concrete collection of the writings of many of the frequent participants in the Natural Land Institute of Northern Illinois annual poetry events. Second, it served as a fund raising opportunity for the Natural Land Institute. Third, and for a lot of the people who have had the chance to enjoy the book, it gathered some lovely and interesting works together to create a worthwhile collection.

It is a great project with pieces by Carolyn Bailey, Dorothy Bock, Mary Caskey, Ed Collins, Sandra Fenton, Carol Fox, Don Miller, Wilda Morris, Chelsea Peterson, Christopher D. Sims, Christine Swanberg, Lani Richardson, Dr. Karen Blake Ruffner, and Kaitlyn Tibbetts. 

If you happen across it or are in the mood to read some lovely nature poems inspired by the northern Illinois region, I recommend it. It is currently available on the Natural Land Institute's website.

Funny Story

So, I've been writing a lot lately. Just not *here.*
Here. ------>
In my little travel journal.

Frankly, poetry has felt very therapeutic lately. No, not that self-indulgent angst-fest that I wrote when I was a teenager. This isn't all complete drivel, but let's be honest, feeding creativity is healthy.
Anyway, part of the whole writing process is making a choice: keep it private or try to find a good home for it. I've been trying to home most of my work. Not the total drivel. It gets to live and die on my OneDrive.
Submitting writing involves cover letters. I hate them. You hate them. We all hate them. They always make me feel like a mouse squeaking at the wall. So yesterday, amidst a high stress moment of trying to not sound quite like a mouse, I decided to go an entirely different direction.
I swept caution back into the closet and asked myself what I would want to read if I were on the receiving end, and ended up dancing down the path of whimsy.
It was more or less polite nonsense, but nonetheless, I slipped it into the envelope (yes, honest to goodness envelope, like it's 1989) with more calm than I'd ever felt submitting anything.
I smiled and thought "even if they don't like my work, they'll enjoy the cover letter."

I don't know if I'll be bravely whimsical on subsequent cover letters, but man, just this once? It felt good.

So, before I go about shooting myself in my writing hand with future cover letters, what do you do to make you feel good about your cover letter?

Carrot

A quick and colorful story about a bright orange cat with a regular life who gets a notion in her head that it might be nice to be someone else. What I liked best about Carrot was the intensity of color in the illustrations, and their energy. The story was cute and will appeal to kids who like to daydream about being someone else, and who enjoy the reminder that being oneself is a good thing, but when reading it aloud, the rhythm was awkward.

I had the opportunity to review an ebook version of Carrot through Netgalley.

Skylight

When Curled into a good book, it takes a truly witty or moving turn of phrase to pull me away from the next morsel in order to take notes, or to mark a passage.  Yet, something in Carol Muske-Dukes word choice, her deft execution of the trickster form, the seductive way she turns a poem on the reader and leaves them as exposed as the subject matter, left me marking passages again and again, notating over and over, "yes! this is exactly how it feels," or "Mrs. L. needs to read this." Twenty-two times she caught me, brought me up short, and sent me scrambling for a way to remember her words and the way they made me feel in that moment.

Her word choice in The Painter's Daughter,  "Coaxing the murder that no one saw from the stubborn evidence of light." It's visceral, full bodied, and yet somehow alienating. When she writes about the opium trip of a man who seems to has lost his lover, perhaps his wife in a car accident that was his fault, but that he can't escape the pain and guilt of, the poem begins so inconspicuously, but ends so painfully and hauntingly, it's like a scab you can't help but pick.

Her writing puts me in mind of Margaret Atwood, and will stay with me. Her work is uncomfortable, explores, child loss, abandonment, violence, abuse, gender identity, and ivory tower feminism. It certainly won't be everyone's cup of tea, but for those moved but such tea, it is strong tea.

Skylight is published by Open Road Integrated Media and is available on Amazon.

I  recieved a free review copy through Netgalley.

Ivy in Bloom: The Poetry of Spring from Great Poets and Writers from the Past

Seldom does a book offer a sweet poetic tale for children and a more in depth poetic journey for the caregiver, but Ivy in Bloom does just that. Illuminating the story of a girl who longs for spring and then delights in it's waking and blooming around her, and filled with lovely illustrations, Ivy in Bloom captures the yearning for spring and the soul refreshing qualities inspired by early flowers and the joy of warmth. Of course, I then moreover relished the wealth of spring poems collected at the end from which the inspiration for Ivy's story was taken.
This is a lovely book, and I enjoyed sharing it with my child.


I received a free eARC of this title for review purposes. I have not been compensated in any other way for my review, which was not swayed in any way by the free nature of said ARC.

Trickster

"I can't read this passage in a language I was never taught."

-Trailhead

Poetry is a curious beast. As Potts wrote in Fable, the piece illustrated on the cover, his collection "began innocently enough." In the classic sense of a trickster poem, the first poem invites one into a simple setting, then twists the scenario masterfully. However, my favorite poems throughout this collection were the ones that encapsulated complex moments and ideas.

A moving and diverse collection filled with earthy and naturalist reflections as well as visceral reminders of humanity's relationship with the animals with whom we coexist and upon which we depend for our food. At times, the grit and brutality with which Potts reduces breathing life to meat and bone unsettled me, I far prefer unsettling poetry that made me feel than simple rhymes that failed to evoke an emotional response. Through his exploration of the natural world and man's interaction therewith, Potts seldom fails to deliver on the promise of emotional awakening.

Trickster, from University of Iowa Press, is a diverse collection, and of course every poem will not appeal to every reader, and likely each reader will find some poems off putting while others will knit themselves to the reader's heart. Trickster is filled with images that will haunt and short turns of phrase that will echo in the reader's mind for years to come. This is a fine collection to enjoy in a light breeze under the evening sky, or perhaps in one's favorite reading chair in a living room that doesn't fill with smoke- though I suggest reading it on paper, because in a literary world seemingly devoid of modern technology,  there is something of a cognitive dissonance in reading it on one's e-reader.

I received a free eARC of this title for review purposes. I have not been compensated in any other way for my review, which was not swayed in any way by the free nature of said ARC.