Breena Clarke's Blog: A Few Whiles , page 2

Spells: New and Selected Poems by Annie Finch

Spells is a comprehensive collection of four decades of Annie Finch's published poetry. The poems are scintillatingly sexy, are sensual, too, of course, and beautiful, snapping and crackling with pictures for the olfactory sense, the eyes, the mind, and the natural world with a reminder that the often elusive and always mysterious communication between human bodies is the natural world’s most significant and most delightful gift. The collection is a wellspring of flawless formal poetry.

Earth Day

All we want is to find the love
in the faces of the people we love.
All we need is to find the dark
in the nighttime sky, to lie down to sleep
in the darkness, where stars and moon keep vigil,
in the silence of a sleeping earth.
All we require is to wake to sunlight
in the morning, to simple sky,
to breathe aloud as the sky is breathing,
to drink the water of the earth.

All we need is to touch the planet
and find it clean where we were born,
where our ancestors breathed and planted,
where we live with the plants and birds.

All we need is to live with the memory
of a future we want to imagine.
All we want is to find the love
in the face of the planet we love.

---Annie Finch

Annie Finch is a Participating Writers at Hobart Festival of Women Writers 2018, September 7, 8, 9th

Jam On The Vine

In Jam On The Vine by LaShonda Katrice Barnett Ivoe Williams is a character that many white Americans would find surprising. She is a bold, intelligent, visionary and hard-working autodidact. This young woman, set in the mold of lynching crusader, Ida B. Wells, changes the dynamics of small-town east Texas with her newspaper journalism and activism. She is personally unconventional. Barnett's novel offers a wider, more inclusive view of a swath of American history from the late 1890's to the middle of the 1920's. This is a must-read for fans of American historical fiction especially, as well as anyone who wants a good, good story.
LaShonda Katrice Barnett will be a Participating Writer at Hobart Festival of Women Writers 2018, September 7, 8 &9th.

The Pink Box by Yesenia Montilla

The beautifully arresting cover art for the poetry collection, "The Pink Box" by Yesenia Montilla is as compelling as the poems within. This delightful alchemy does not often happen. Alexis De Veaux, novelist, biographer, and essayist says of Montilla's work, "Yesenia Montilla’s poems cross-fertilize space and time; linking the wilderness, the city, and an otherworld like a subway ride from uptown to downtown, crosstown and back. Along the way, we don’t just switch trains, we switch stations of desire: the Dominican Republic is the blues, Ayiti/Haiti is jazz, hip-hop is abuelita. "

Yes. The poems of "The Pink Box" have much movement. They are paeans to immigration and integration and syncretism and the simple inclusion of all relevant identity, all relevant beauty. They are a praise song to Afro-Latina experiences. They are seductive poems. You may gobble up more in one sitting than you intend. Fall for them.

Yesenia Montilla is a Participating Writers for Hobart Festival of Women Writers 2018, September 7, 8 &9th. #Hobartwomenwriter18 #womenwrite

The Quarry Fox and other Critters of The Wild Catskills

Throughout this long, harsh winter I've returned to thinking about Leslie T. Sharpe's completely engaging narrative of the Western Catskills, an area that I'm acquainted with only a bit, only peripherally. Leslie T. Sharpe knows this highland very deeply, in all its complexities. And, in "The Quarry Fox" she dispels misconceptions and illumines many of the region's mysteries. This is nature writing at its best. I was transported to the beautiful Catskills. Leslie Sharpe is a keen observer and a trustworthy recorder. She shares her prodigious knowledge of the native critters and their landscape and engenders a sincere interest to learn more. A great book. It doesn't have to be read in one gulp. Savor it.

Like Light: 25 Years of Poetry & Prose By Bright Hill Poets & Writers

LIke Light: 25 Years of Poetry & Prose by Bright Hill Poets & Writers, edited by Bertha Rogers is a big book of good writing. Bertha Rogers, who created the readings program at Bright Hill Press & Literary Center, a beautiful Catskill mountain haven for literature and art, has collected work by the writers she has invited to read at Bright Hill over the past twenty-five years. The book is no less than a compendium of poetry and short prose of those writers from the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Europe who have come to the Western Catskills to share their work at The Bright Hill Press & Literary Center. It is filled - nearly 500 pages - with fine writing and is a volume for the reader's shelf to be returned to again and again. Among others, the volume includes the work of Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Esther Cohen, Breena Clarke, Cheryl Clarke, Lisa Wujnovich, Ginnah Howard. Bertha Rogers, who is very involved in the arts & culture of the Catskills community, will be a participating writer at The Hobart Festival of Women Writers and will present an Intensive Workshop: The Ultimate Metaphor.
http://www.hobartfestivalofwomenwrite...

Gathering The Waters

Keisha-Gaye Anderson's poems in the collection, "Gathering the Waters" are beautiful. These poems are like a box of delightful belongings, like a container of tangible things that cause us to recollect other pictures, other days. Anderson speaks about all of the people of colors in the Western Hemisphere as they live and work in poems that move relentlessly yet are accessible, understandable. An essential and lovely collection. I won't soon forget "Mask," or "The Purge," or "Survival." Ah, "A Message to My Descendents" is beautiful. These are poems to return to again and again.

Keisha-Gaye Anderson will be a participating writer at Hobart Festival of Women Writers 2018, September 7, 8 &9 in Hobart, New York, The Book Village of the Catskills

When Trouble Comes . . . and woe

In “An American Marriage,’ by Tayari Jones, The Oprah Book Club’s latest pick, the devastating effects on a tender, struggling young marriage reverberate throughout their extended families when Roy Hamilton is charged and convicted of a crime he did not commit. His successful, rising star artist wife Celestial, daughter of an upwardly mobile Atlanta couple becomes collaterally damaged by a corrupted criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex’s humiliating, dehumanizing strictures. “An American Marriage” is suspenseful in a non-frenetic style, an easy-going, readable style that pulls the reader into the circle of the families of Celestial and Roy. The shifts of perspective keep readers wanting to follow one side then the other and to test reality, to hear all the truths. Empathy abounds but does not obscure harsh truths about the damage that parenting can cause. Tayari Jones’ novel calculates the toll taken on a family and the larger community when one person is incarcerated in our punishment system, the cruelty exacerbated by this man’s innocence. And as gentle and easy going as the narrative is, the writing is likewise gentle, loving, closely observed of the intimate lives of a contemporary African American couple. Jones continues the finely wrought, sensitive work begun in her previous novels, also based in the contemporary south, “Leaving Atlanta,” “The Untelling,” and “Silver Sparrow.”

Powder Necklace by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond

In Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond's debut novel, "Powder Necklace, Lila, born and acculturated in London is uprooted to Ghana, her mother's childhood home.Uprooted suddenly from her accustomed life by her capricious mother Lila becomes a "broni", a foreigner and must learn a new culture. Brew-Hammond's scenes at Dadaba, the boarding school in Ghana that Lila's aunt bribes her way into is unsparing and revealing as is this entire novel of insights. Though the divorced single mother and the angst-ridden teenaged daughter conflict is at the heart of "Powder Necklace," the novel is not simply a "mad at mom" type of narrative. The challenges of adapting to ordinary, everyday global disparities in access to education, water, and lifestyle choices are at the center of Lila's journeys through London, Ghana and the United States. "Powder Necklace" is a lyrical exploration of the complex identities of individuals whose roots are nurtured in diverse soils. Nana Elua Brew-Hammond will read from "Powder Necklace" at the six annual Hobart Festival of Women Writers 2018 on September 7 8,&9th.

Ghost Summer: Stories by Tananarive Due

Knowable horror that makes me quake

Ghost Summer: Stories by Tananarive Due

These stories are suspenseful - really, really suspenseful. The reader finds herself gobbling the tales — telling herself to slow down, but saying, “Go on. Go on. Let’s find out what’s happening next.” There is a certain interlocutory feel to reading the stories as if we’re telling stories around a campfire or cross-legged on a best friends bed inside our heads — as though we are hearing the story told and are asking questions. And as in all of those secret collusions outside of the purview of parents, teachers and authority figures, in these stories we are titillated and horrified often in equal measure. Due suggests horrors that we allow our minds to fill in. We know about a whole lot of real life horribleness. The wise child's perspective is flawless in the title story, "Ghost Stories". It works on so many levels. We are already well-primed when we begin this story which is the third of three set in Gracetown, Fla. Oh, what a place! This final story is heartstoppingly suspenseful. It has complex characters several of whom change and evolve in plausible and deeply meaningful ways though the young person’s perspective is never exceeded. The outcome of the tale stays within the imaginative range of this somewhat sheltered child and never exposes him to some of the other horrors we readers can imagine. Due creates a speculative look backward to the past - a look that plumbs the truly horrible and torturous events of the slavery and reconstruction eras. The real real - the everyday horrors of the lives of southern blacks - are the devices of this horror story. It's fitting that Stephen King has blurbed this collection. These horror fantasy tales are of a kind with King’s novels, Carrie and Cujo, in that they magnify realistic fears to an awful pitch. The reader responds inside her head, “But things never get this bad, do they?” In the case of the horrors of the Jim Crow south employed/portrayed judiciously here in these stories, the horror unrevealed continues to haunt the reader long after the conclusion of the tale. “How did they survive the horrors to which they were subjected.

A host of contemporary challenges and future technological speculation converges in these stories as well. Things spun from headlines but taken a step or two further than the here and now and the everyday. But each story has shadows in doorways and out of the corners of an eye. There are apparitions and wraiths and enigmatic grandparents and deeply troubled parents and vulnerable siblings and friends and lots of plausible fiends and scary domiciles and spells and potions and bloodletting. And there are wise, courageous children in these stories — agents of hope. The world of Due’s imagination is neither dystopian nor utopian, but plausibly frightening and finally very, very optimistic.

I like a good ghost story and this is a collection of a lot of them. I think I like these tales best because they are speculative stories that stay within the basic human configuration that I am used to. I tend to most appreciate the mystery and marvels of human behavior. Tananarive Due gives us so many intriguing turns in “Ghost Summer: Stories”

Angels Make Their Hope Here

Available in paperback on July 14th

this edition contains an interview with Breena Clarke. Clarke talks about the genesis of the imagined tri-racial community of Russell's Knob. Also included are reading group guides to assist you in framing a discussion of this important historical novel. Be the one who gets the credit for a really good book suggestion.