Bloomsberries and Other Curiosities

by Laurie Byro

With The Bloomsberries and Other Curiosities Laurie Byro combines intellectual firepower, wit, and mischievous wisdom to earn her place in poetry’s memory. Here, a new calculus for the Bloomsbury set is refreshed by energy, imagination, along with natural strengths of craft and metrics. I love these characters recreated; I love reading their stories as they chase each line to new poetic mythologies. In ‘Other Curiosities’ Byro unleashes her true anarchism, turning fairytale to reality. This book is a starship with history and fantasy blasted to brilliance. It’s the promise made, that poetry will always be on our side— soul, heart , intelligence— blown out of dark, landing right in our laps, just when we need it the most.
Grace Cavalieri, Producer “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress.”

72 pages, Paperback

Published February 16, 2017

About the author

Laurie Byro has been facilitating “Circle of Voices” poetry discussion in New Jersey libraries for over 26 years. Laurie has garnered more IBPC awards (InterBoard Poetry Community) than any other poet, stopping at 60. She began competing in 2002 and was named "Poet of the Decade" for work produced between 2000-2010. She had two books of poetry published in 2015: Luna (Aldrich Press) and Gertrude Stein's Salon and Other Legends (Blue Horse Press). A chapbook was published in 2016, Wonder (Little Lantern Press) out of Wales. She received a 2016 New Jersey Poet's Prize for the first poem in the Stein collection and received a NJ Poetry Prize for a poem in: "The Bloomsberries and Other Curiosities" by Kelsay Books. Laurie had a 5th book published "La Dogaressa & Other Poems" (Cowboy Buddha Press.) "D'eux & Other Sorrows" by Cowboy Buddha Press, poems about Vincent Van Gogh and Isadora Duncan among others was published in 2019. Laurie's latest collection "Hopeless Romance" was published in 2021 by Cholla Needles Arts and Literary Library. Laurie was a travel agent for 24 years, a librarian for 14 years. She has traveled widely, most recently Italy, Greece, and Provence and has used these explorations in order to write her "Salon" poems having visited the places these events took place. She refers to her Salon poems as "historical poetry." Laurie is currently Poet in Residence at the Albert Wisner Public Library where "Circle of Voices" continues to meet and Pacem in Terris, Warwick New York. She is proud to say her artist husband, Michael Byro, has created all the paintings that grace the covers of her books. D'eux has 8 pages of his paintings of Van Gogh in pointillism.

Reviews

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

With literary insouciance and metrical verve, Laurie Byro makes her debut with The Bloomsberries and Other Curiosities. Arranged like a diptych, the first half of the book opens with the Bloomsbury cast. Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Dora Carrington, plus D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot, make guest appearances in Byro’s witty, sensuous, thoughtful, flippant, but dead serious poems. In the “other curiosities” half of her lyrical, piquant book, Byro explores art and artists in elegant stanzas written from, of, and to contemporary poets and poems. With the wry, dry love notes of The Bloomsberries and Other Curiosities. this poet practices a sublime ekphrasis.