Poetry and About Poetry

The Embrace: Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo  by  Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda My rating:  4 of 5 stars “The Embrace” by Carolyn Kreiter Foronda imagines the voices of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera from the poet’s reading of their letters and journals as well as her own imagination. Many of the selections are two poems interlaced so that you may read them separately or together as a third poem. While this device works more often than not, as in the “Two Fridas” poems, there are places with it stumbles such as in “Deer Running.” Overall, this collection is emotionally powerful without slipping too far into the maudlin. The language is generally fresh and eloquent. In a number of cases animals or inanimate objects are personified and given a speaking voice with mixed success. (I find it difficult to suspend disbelief in listening to a crematorium oven speaking.) “The Embrace” sides with Frida Kahlo in this tortured relationship, ...

The Embrace: Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo by Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda My rating: 4 of 5 stars "The Embrace" by Carolyn Kreiter Foronda imagines the voices of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera from the poet's reading of their letters and journals as well as her own imagination. Many of the selections are two poems interlaced so that you may read them separately or together as a third poem. While this device works more often than not, as in the "Two Fridas" poems, there are places with it stumbles such as in "Deer Running." Overall, this collection is emotionally powerful without slipping too far into the maudlin. The language is generally fresh and eloquent. In a number of cases animals or inanimate objects are personified and given a speaking voice with mixed success. (I find it difficult to suspend disbelief in listening to a crematorium oven speaking.) "The Embrace" sides with Frida Kahlo in this tortured relationship, a sym...

Watch True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality, the original HBO documentary online at HBO.com or stream on your own device. — Read on www.hbo.com/documentaries/true-justice-bryan-stevensons-fight-for-equality

“There’s a history of untold cruelty that hides in the silence in this country.” – Bryan Stevenson Watch True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality, the original HBO documentary online at HBO.com or stream on your own device. — Read on www.hbo.com/documentaries/true-justice-bryan-stevensons-fight-for-equality

The Lost Words  by  Robert Macfarlane My rating:  5 of 5 stars A children’s book. A book for adults to read to children. A set of spells to enchant adults. A book of beautiful art for heart’s sake. A book of lost words for what may become lost worlds. A spellbook that helps children spell and say the words for wild and free. A book for children to save themselves from what we have helped them lose. A book for children to chant to adults.. before it the words for wild things are too gone to be remembered. View all my reviews

The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane My rating: 5 of 5 stars A children's book. A book for adults to read to children. A set of spells to enchant adults. A book of beautiful art for heart's sake. A book of lost words for what may become lost worlds. A spellbook that helps children spell and say the words for wild and free. A book for children to save themselves from what we have helped them lose. A book for children to chant to adults.. before it the words for wild things are too gone to be remembered. View all my reviews

The pen may not be mightier than the sword, but it sure frightens people. So, you want to read a banned book? Here’s a list of banned and challenged classic American novels. — Read on www.thoughtco.com/most-banned-classic-novels-738741

The pen may not be mightier than the sword, but it sure frightens people. So, you want to read a banned book? Here’s a list of banned and challenged classic American novels. — Read on www.thoughtco.com/most-banned-classic-novels-738741

The Heights of Macchu Picchu  by  Pablo Neruda My rating:  4 of 5 stars A mythopoetic and somewhat surrealistic set of 12 cantos by Pablo Neruda, “The Heights” by one of the finest poets of the 20th Century transcends the personal/lyrical in an eloquence of vision. Neruda uses Macchu Picchu (Intentionally writing two Cs in the first word) to place himself in a larger world of history and time. I love nearly everything I read by Neruda, but I wish that I could read Spanish better than I do so I could give a more informed review as to the quality of this translation. Nonetheless, Tomas Morin gives a workmanlike English version that is worth reading. View all my reviews

The Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda My rating: 4 of 5 stars A mythopoetic and somewhat surrealistic set of 12 cantos by Pablo Neruda, "The Heights" by one of the finest poets of the 20th Century transcends the personal/lyrical in an eloquence of vision. Neruda uses Macchu Picchu (Intentionally writing two Cs in the first word) to place himself in a larger world of history and time. I love nearly everything I read by Neruda, but I wish that I could read Spanish better than I do so I could give a more informed review as to the quality of this translation. Nonetheless, Tomas Morin gives a workmanlike English version that is worth reading. View all my reviews

Clementine Unbound  will publish my poem “Now Is Not the Time to Talk about Guns” online beginning August 20.  This is the second of my poems published by  Clementine . Thank you Editor GF Boyer. 

Clementine Unbound  will publish my poem "Now Is Not the Time to Talk about Guns" online beginning August 20. This is the second of my poems published by  Clementine . Thank you Editor GF Boyer.

Clementine Unbound  will publish my poem “Now Is Not the Time to Talk about Guns” online beginning August 20.  This is the second of my poems published by  Clementine . Thank you Editor GF Boyer. 

Congratulations to Joy Harjo, the new Poet Laureate of the United States.  Read an interview with her  HERE . 

Congratulations to Joy Harjo, the new Poet Laureate of the United States.  Read an interview with her  HERE . 

Congratulations to Joy Harjo, the new Poet Laureate of the United States. Read an interview with her HERE .

One of the shockwaves from Charles Darwin’s idea that humans evolved from other animals was moral panic. If our ethics are not guided by an omnipotent and all-knowing god and, instead, life is driven by ‘survival of the fittest’ via natural selection, how could we possibly expect humans to behave with anything other than brash self-interest? Yet Darwin’s use of the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ was hardly meant to suggest that existence was a knockdown, drag-out fight – he was very clear that generosity, sympathy and all those other traits that give us warm feelings are central to human survival. In this short video, the psychologist Dacher Keltner at the University of California, Berkeley puts kindness in evolutionary context, connecting his own recent neural-imaging work on compassion with Darwin’s view that sympathy is a cornerstone of human flourishing. — Read on aeon.co/videos/dont-misread-darwin-for-humans-survival-of-the-fittest-means-being-sympathetic And poetry expand...

One of the shockwaves from Charles Darwin’s idea that humans evolved from other animals was moral panic. If our ethics are not guided by an omnipotent and all-knowing god and, instead, life is driven by ‘survival of the fittest’ via natural selection, how could we possibly expect humans to behave with anything other than brash self-interest? Yet Darwin’s use of the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ was hardly meant to suggest that existence was a knockdown, drag-out fight – he was very clear that generosity, sympathy and all those other traits that give us warm feelings are central to human survival. In this short video, the psychologist Dacher Keltner at the University of California, Berkeley puts kindness in evolutionary context, connecting his own recent neural-imaging work on compassion with Darwin’s view that sympathy is a cornerstone of human flourishing. — Read on aeon.co/videos/dont-misread-darwin-for-humans-survival-of-the-fittest-means-being-sympathetic And poe...

The Wanderer  by  Christine Gosnay My rating:  4 of 5 stars Christine Gosnay’s chapbook “The Wanderer” contains some of the finest poetry I have read from a poet of the new century so far. Gosnay is not afraid to use imagery from nature, but she does it in a fresh way. Yellow heat strafes the hand-deep water where the shade-eyed darner makes its notch. At the same time, she also revivifies the commonplace of living. It means that when I pull nothing out from the soft center where my stomach, pale and useful, longs, pulling as if at a doll’s string to say ache in a bright, unrecognizable voice, I move my ind by the hand from the dark blue room where it is thinking-feeling toward the edge of the blank graph… Her poems are collages of experiences, images, and thoughts that still maintain an overall unity of feeling and thinking. Unlike many collections, “The Wanderer” does not falter or contain poems that show obvious need for more r...

The Wanderer by Christine Gosnay My rating: 4 of 5 stars Christine Gosnay's chapbook "The Wanderer" contains some of the finest poetry I have read from a poet of the new century so far. Gosnay is not afraid to use imagery from nature, but she does it in a fresh way. Yellow heat strafes the hand-deep water where the shade-eyed darner makes its notch. At the same time, she also revivifies the commonplace of living. It means that when I pull nothing out from the soft center where my stomach, pale and useful, longs, pulling as if at a doll's string to say ache in a bright, unrecognizable voice, I move my ind by the hand from the dark blue room where it is thinking-feeling toward the edge of the blank graph... Her poems are collages of experiences, images, and thoughts that still maintain an overall unity of feeling and thinking. Unlike many collections, "The Wanderer" does not falter or contain poems that show obvious need fo...

Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy My rating: 4 of 5 stars View all my reviews

My friend, Allan Peterson, is reading from his new collection, This Luminous: New and Selected Poem , at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco on Jun 11. Stop by if you are in the area.

My friend, Allan Peterson, is reading from his new collection,  This Luminous: New and Selected Poem , at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco on Jun 11. Stop by if you are in the area.

My friend, Allan Peterson, is reading from his new collection, This Luminous: New and Selected Poem , at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco on Jun 11. Stop by if you are in the area.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. My rating: 5 of 5 stars A bitter, faithful, frightening, holy, blasphemous dystopian novel. One of the best written. View all my reviews

Congratulations to Fredericksburg poet Elizabeth “Beth” Spragins on the release of her new collection “The Language of Bones” available from Amazon HERE . Elizabeth Spencer Spragins truly is in touch with ancient bards and the glorious music of the incantations of druidic sisters in her collection  The Language of Bones.  Roaming the geography and history of America, these verses hark back to the British and Celtic ancestry of the original European settlers. “Children run unshod, / Armed with goldenrod,” reenacting the past as they unknowingly step on its buried remnants. As the poet writes, the reader will indeed “linger late” and read with “awe and meditate” on history written in the earth and echoed in these lyrical poems inspired by those ancient bards.

Congratulations to Fredericksburg poet Elizabeth “Beth” Spragins on the release of her new collection “The Language of Bones” available from Amazon HERE . Elizabeth Spencer Spragins truly is in touch with ancient bards and the glorious music of the incantations of druidic sisters in her collection  The Language of Bones.  Roaming the geography and history of America, these verses hark back to the British and Celtic ancestry of the original European settlers. “Children run unshod, / Armed with goldenrod,” reenacting the past as they unknowingly step on its buried remnants. As the poet writes, the reader will indeed “linger late” and read with “awe and meditate” on history written in the earth and echoed in these lyrical poems inspired by those ancient bards.

Congratulations to Fredericksburg poet Elizabeth "Beth" Spragins on the release of her new collection "The Language of Bones" available from Amazon HERE .  Elizabeth Spencer Spragins truly is in touch with ancient bards and the glorious music of the incantations of druidic sisters in her collection  The Language of Bones.  Roaming the geography and history of America, these verses hark back to the British and Celtic ancestry of the original European settlers. “Children run unshod, / Armed with goldenrod,” reenacting the past as they unknowingly step on its buried remnants. As the poet writes, the reader will indeed “linger late” and read with “awe and meditate” on history written in the earth and echoed in these lyrical poems inspired by those ancient bards.