Uvi Poznansky's Blog, page 276

Review: Embracing Me, Embracing you

Before I share with you my review for this book, let me explain the initial burst of interest I found in the title, Embracing Me, Embracing You--before I even knew what it was about. I was intrigued by an apparent similarity between this title and an idea I explored, with great curiosity, in my book Apart From Love. And this is it: The new lover embraces his partner, who in turn embraces the shadow of his love for someone who can no longer be here. In the words of Anita, the female protagonist in my story:

"So I take a step closer to Lenny, and this time I don’t allow myself to be stopped—not by him, not by that shadow, and not by nothing else I’ve seen in my head, just now. And I brush my lips over his hair, and spread my arms real wide, hugging her hugging him." 
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Michelle Bellon, the author of Embracing Me, Embracing You, sweeps you into the story right from the start, bringing the angst and excitement of a coming-of-age story to life by making you intimately engaged with her character Roshell, whose voice is punctuated, here and there, with the voices of the her teenage friends: Amber, Sabrina, Tim, the new, mysterious guy in her life, Gabriel, Nico, and others. You are there to hear all of them, as if you were an invisible confidante, leaning in to hear one character, then another, so that you can hear Roshell's inner thoughts and also the way others see her.


Resonating with great conviction, Roshell's voice has a personal, truly autobiographic feel to it, imbued with intelligence and humor. She lives with her mom and grandma in a trailer park, which to her is a wasteland, a symbol of being poor and despondent. Her dream is to become a prima ballerina. She makes her entrance into the story spraying her hair, teasing and curling it to shape it in stiff, vertical bangs, then dancing at a party with such flair as to embarrass herself publicly by splitting the seam of her jeans. So endearing! So is her conversation with Amber, sharing the little she knows about French kissing. In her mind, it is kind of slobbery and awkward at first until your body takes over.


During prom night Roshell finds herself uncharacteristically tongue-tied in Gabriel's presence, and not only because he is her best friend's date. Part of her brain keeps encouraging her to come up with something witty, or smart, or just anything that resembles words, but instead she just stares. We can hear her heart fluttering under the spell of first love, yearning for giving herself completely to him. It is because of him that she frees herself from the prison of loneliness, only to face a great loss, from which she has to recover so it does not consume her.


Michelle Bellon is a talented writer with prolific interests, from coming-of-age stories to military was experiences, all of which express themselves in her writing. She has written four books: His Salvation, and The Complexity of a Soldier, which received 5-star reviews from Amazon Top Reviewers. 

Poem by My Father: When Life Becomes a Curse

When life becomes a curse Like a stonemill you must heft No one's here to ask for helpNot a single friend is leftThen your soul is bitter, cleft.The children flew, one far, one distant...Four walls, the home is vacant How can you hug her, she is absent No one is left but memoriesThen the heavy burden slapsA man on the verge of his collapse.
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This is a poem by my father, Zeev Kachel, translated by me from the original Hebrew, which can be found here.
Earlier this year I edited and published his Hebrew poetry book, posthumously. It is called Ropes, Separation, Tear (Hebrew Edition) 

Fusion of Dream and Reality: My Father's Life

A few years back I started writing a biography, which I am yet to complete: my father's life. The starting point was this moment, when the old man, who was an author, poet and artist in the prime of his life, nods to sleep, propped by pillows on his armchair:
"Here is the place – he can bring it back – his first home. Straight ahead is the door with a big handle high above. He can easily reach it, standing on the tips of his toes and pushing, pushing forward. It opens! Here is the room, which he shares with his sister, Batia. He is three yours old; she is five. And somehow he knows: she will come in later, much later. He can climb into bed now. Sleep is coming; he can feel it. Sleep is almost here. It weighs heavily on his lids, but – for just a second – he can lift his dreamy gaze and look up at the painted ceiling. Half of it is night, with a large crescent moon surrounded by a swirl of stars, the other half – day, with a bright, yellow sun. He rubs his eyes, astonished. Nothing like this has ever happened before: They stir! The sun, the moon and the glowing stars – they all seem to move, seem to turn overhead... Then, all of the sudden, amidst the glow, he finds himself standing at the banks of a lake with his daddy. He lets go of his daddy’s hand, flings a stone and at once he can spot – right there, in the middle of the lake – a ripple taking shape. One circle rises magically inside another, widening away, riding out farther and farther until at long last it fades out. White lilies can be seen floating all around. One of them is right here, at arms reach. Only a thin line, the line of illusion, separates the petal from its white reflection. And underneath it, schools of golden fish scurry in one direction, then take a sharp turn and flow elsewhere. And from somewhere in the distance he can hear a shrill sound: the whistle of a train. Soon, Zeev knows, it will go out of earshot again, as the train travels past the hills, going away on its mysterious journey, calling him to come, calling him to follow."
And here is a watercolor portrait I made, after his passing, to remember him by:

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Earlier this year I edited and published his Hebrew poetry book, posthumously. It is called Ropes, Separation, Tear (Hebrew Edition) 

In Darkness Take a Leap

In darkness take a leap For trust is blindImagine me: I'll lift you, Caress you and possess you Imagine us: In passion and in sweepOur limbs entwined
This verse of the poem Dust begged to be created so you can move around it, see and touch it. 
Here it is. Half-life-size, cast in bronze:




To read another verse and see the sculpture based on it, click here.
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To hear the radio interview about my published work click here.

New Review of Apart From Love

So glad! I must share. The first UK review of my book appeared minutes ago on Amazon! 


A. Rose, a Top Amazon Reviewer (ranks #118 in the UK) writes:
"Uvi Poznasky is a very talented lady, not only is she a very accomplished writer, she is a poet, sculptor, artist, teacher and much more. The beautiful cover of the book is of one of her works of art and after visiting her website I see that she is indeed gifted and worth taking a look at uviart.com . This is a beautiful and sophisticated novel of love, loss and torture and well worth reading." 


To read more, click here. 

From Poem to Animation: Jess and Wiggle

Once there was a little girlWith the cutest reddish curlHer name--how could you guess?It was simply--Jess

So started a poem I wrote for a little girl named Jess, who at two months was looking at the world with such an intense, serious observation, as if to examine if anything was worthy of a smile. Once the ink dried on paper, each verse started forming shapes in my mind. So here is the title page:


You can see that from the start, the word 'Jess' became her face, and also that it bore an expression, sad at the beginning, happy by the end. Likewise, the word Wiggle was drawn, literally with a wave in it, one 'g' rolling around the other. Other words soon followed, becoming pictorial elements that express their meaning (see the word 'not' (forming a stop sign) and 'you' (pointing at you) in the image below.

Then, once the entire book was ready, I used the illustrations to create an animation, which Jess loves to hear to this day.

Are Your Reading Habits Changing?

Are your reading habits changing because of the new generation of eBook devices? Do you find yourself hindered, as you try to immerse in reading, by their multi-purpose design, which offers a multitude of ways for your concentration to stray away? The original Kindle was not designed as a multi-purpose device, specifically so that readers could focus on reading and nothing else. But in a competitive market, where the iPad, Nook and Kindle are forced to come up with newer designs, eBook devices offer more and more temptations to lure us away from the task at hand--more inventive escapes, that end up shortening our attention span.

Is this a question of concern to you? It is to the writer of this New York Times article, called Finding Your Book Interrupted ... By the Tablet You Read It On. 

I may be alone in this, but somehow I'm afraid that if enough of us fall change our habits, our attention span might be cut down not only for reading a book--but also for reading each other's lips. Another words, listening. And then, the world we live in could easily become the new Babylon, where the less we listen, the more weird is what we hear, and every word separates itself from our language, till all we can do is just turn to our tablets and click ourselves away.

Beautifully Written, Poignant Poetry: "Peer Inside My Soul and See Me"

The literary scene is so crowded nowadays, that finding a book worth your time seems like a hard exercise at times. This is why I am posting my book review for Peer Inside My Soul and See Me in this blog. De Ann Townes Jr. opens up the most intimate places in her being, inviting you to read her, all of her: the passion, the longing, the hurt. She takes you deep inside, in spite of her pain and vulnerability, because at that moment, the moment when you peer inside, her emotions are most raw, intense, and vivid. 

Her poetry is about her love, her jealousy, and even about her longing to be defined by her lover. At times she lets the man she loves think of her as if she were a big canvas. With total submission, total rapture she lets him become the creator of her existence. Such are her images, images that elevate the ordinary into a poetic vision. Her rapture sweeps her, and him too, into a mystical spell of destruction. 

De Ann shows no hesitation when she introduces certain expressions, once in a while, in spanish into her poems, which adds a special touch, as if you caught a whisper between the two of them. She gave special attention to the layout of the book, where all the poems are 'centered' on the page. This makes the words, and the varying length of each phrase, become a graphical element black on white, as if the poem has turned into a graphic vase, holding the words inside.

Highly recommended!

The Face of the Story

I take book cover design with the utmost seriousness. It gives a face to the story, and must express it faithfully, in graphical terms. In my mind, when you take my book into your arms, you must be rewarded by holding a work of art. It starts with the cover, which opens the door and sweeps you, page after page, into a different world. It continues with a careful layout of the interior pages, and culminates with the story. 



Here, the back cover is a natural extension of the front cover, which gives you the illusion that the image wraps itself around the book, hugging it. You can see layers and layers of red fabric, in which the main character finds herself tangled more and more, losing herself in a knot of passion. 


The text on the cover is no less important. The blurb at the top of the back cover of Apart From Love was contributed by Jeremy Joe Kronsberg, the legendary screen writer, director and producer, who is often amused at being referred to as 'the godfather of the modern ape chase movie'. He wrote the screenplays for 'Every Which Way But Loose', 'Any Which Way You Can' (with Clint Eastwood in the title role), and 'Going Ape' (with Tony Danza in the title role.) In addition, he wrote lyrics to numerous songs, for example 'Feels So Good to Win" (for the movie Coast to Coast), "Sassafras Sundays" for Homebodies, and "Your Guess Is Just As Good As Mine" (for The Outfit.) So I am truly honored that he agreed to grace the back cover of my book, Apart From Love, with his blurb. Having read the story, and having reflected at length on its meaning, he said:


"A fascinating study of three voices who lead us through the tangle of their lives
and challenge us through their wounded communications to re-examine how we connect."

Converting Your Story from Book to eBook

Many of my writing friends, who are curious to know how I accomplished the conversion of Apart From Love from book to ebook, ask me to explain, in excruciating detail, how to do it. My best advice to you, having gone through the process, is not to rush things, or you will create a mess.
Once you convert your story from book to ebook, you have two separate copies of your work. So later, if you want to make a change--even as simple as fixing a punctuation mark--you are left with the need to do it twice, or to start keeping a log of your changes. This gets even more complicated if you maintain several ebook formats: a .epub one for the iPad, a .epub one for the Nook and a .mobi one for the Kindle. It takes some experience to learn that there is a way to collapse these separate files into one, but knowing this came, for me, at the cost of having done things in an order that I would have reversed, had I known better.
So in spite of this great enthusiasm that drives you to convert your book and put it out there, so the readers can start flocking to your door, I suggest you wait until you're sure, absolutely sure, that your story is complete. Done. Finished to the last period. And then wait some more.
Once you are ready, here is a great article by Aaron Shephard called From Word to Kindle.