Poetry and About Poetry

Afterland by Mai Der Vang My rating: 5 of 5 stars Mai Der Vang’s “Afterland” manages to make surrealistic and visionary poetry accessible. She writes from biography and family history but speaks the universal. Images collide and morph into each other and language and syntax warp away and back into common tongue. I particularly liked: – Another Heaven – Original Bones – After All Have Gone – Gray Vestige – This Heft upon Your Leaving – Three Sometimes a poem stretches too far and fails from the surrealism and the warped syntax. But the collection as a whole is a fine one. View all my reviews

Afterland by Mai Der Vang My rating: 5 of 5 stars Mai Der Vang's "Afterland" manages to make surrealistic and visionary poetry accessible. She writes from biography and family history but speaks the universal. Images collide and morph into each other and language and syntax warp away and back into common tongue. I particularly liked: - Another Heaven - Original Bones - After All Have Gone - Gray Vestige - This Heft upon Your Leaving - Three Sometimes a poem stretches too far and fails from the surrealism and the warped syntax. But the collection as a whole is a fine one. View all my reviews

"You can’t zoom through poetry; it forces you to slow down, think, concentrate, relish words and phrases," writes Phillip Yancey in the Washington Post . "Nevertheless, neuroscience proves what each of these busy people have found: it actually takes less energy to focus intently than to zip from task to task. After an hour of contemplation, or deep reading, a person ends up less tired and less neurochemically depleted, thus more able to tackle mental challenges."

Soviet Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky: "We have our own reality." Soviet censor: "You can't say that because it is true." Writers must always be a threat to the powerful.

The Write Place at the Write Time has accepted another of my poems 

The Write Place at the Write Time has accepted another of my poems 

Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazin e will publish 2 of my poems in their Fall/Winter issue this September. 

Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazin e will publish 2 of my poems in their Fall/Winter issue this September. 

At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others by Sarah Bakewell My rating: 5 of 5 stars Excellent Whether you already think you know Existentialism and Phenomenology or think you do not care, this is an excellent and readable work. Part philosophical history, part multiple biographies, part personal and ideational autobiography, part history, part sociology, this is a Cafe worth sitting in and experiencing for a good while. View all my reviews

Two of my poems are now published at T he Write Place at the Write Time . 

Two of my poems are now published at T he Write Place at the Write Time . 

Two Cities Review has accepted one of my poems for future publication.

Two Cities Review has accepted one of my poems for future publication.

Two Cities Review has accepted one of my poems for future publication. 

Two of my poems are included in Issue 2 of Hungry Chimera.