re: is a collection of poems that span over 40 years of my writing. One of them I wrote when I was in college. Many I wrote in my 20s. Some when I was raising my children. A few are more recent.
I wanted to publish this myself. I wanted to make art with my friend, Robin, who is not only a thoughtful, interesting and kind person, but is also a very talented artist. She’s contemplative and skilled. I own a number of her paintings, which are truly some of my most prized possessions. Robin worked in book publishing for many years as a designer and an art director. So I sent her my poems. She read them. And she said yes.
It is so satisfying to create a home for my poems inside a book of my own creation, something I made with my friend. Something for myself, my family, and my friends to hold in our hands.
You can buy a copy at artmobile.com
Bricolage is a collection of poems written from a very personal place. It attempts to process the fact that in the face of immense grief and loss the natural world persists. It’s a chronicle of sorts, a poetic account of the grieving process as it moves through time and space. The ars poetica poems, and some of the others, are about the search to find the right words, about the process of being a poet, of defending choices––poetic and otherwise––all within the context of excavating oneself from loss.
The use of the physical body in these poems sometimes arises as a metaphor for the artistic body of work. But they also explore the painful and challenging experience of living in a female body, in a world that isn’t kind to women. This is especially true about women who are aging, who aren’t seen as sexual human beings, and who become more and more invisible as creative human beings as we age.
Bricolage is in the process of looking for its publishing home.
