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Night Light for Alpha & Latif
Fog down between the houses book wet in minutes shallow pool on the table ink skipping pebbles of mist on the page. No time to complain- it's your luck to have this moist air, a full belly chair on a balcony light to write by- praise for the blessed headlamp's cyclops eye centered on a forehead bent to learn! Otherwise it's just plain dark.
10-31-12 / SF BOOK REVIEW-Find other reviews in 'Endorsements' HOUSE OF THE UNEXPECTED by Steve Deiffenbacher, writer for the Mail Tribune, Medford, Oregon I started ‘House of the Unexpected’ and was immediately swept up in it. It's honest, beautiful, visceral, often painful, but always mesmerizing. Its strength is in how the poet engages both the personal and political and how they mesh with moments of extraordinary grace and love of life. ‘House of the Unexpected’ works excellently, combining the personal dramas with the horrors that have been visited on women in the past and that still are going on in the present. I love its rage and fierce determination, its unstinting willingness to look at the worst and the best that we can be as human beings and its voice of female empowerment. In that sense, I think it's a rare gem. I can't remember the last book of poems I read with that kind of impact. After reading the last half of the book, I realize I hadn't grasped it's full scope, and my appreciation of it is even greater. It starts with the personal, melds it into the political, brings in the connection with nature and spirituality and then ends back with the personal in the tender and honest love poems at the conclusion. In the end, all these things become part of one another. All of them were there all along, but the full journey of the book completes the circle to make that even clearer. I realize again the uniqueness of Julie Rogers’ voice. Always between the lines of her work there is an awareness of the unseen, a felt but impossible-to-define mystery of being. It gives the poems great power.
photograph by Katie Heflin |
The new selected collection of poetry, House of the Unexpected, is now released- orders can be made by emailing via 'CONTACT' at this website ~ $15 + $4 shipping and handling. JULIE'S UPCOMING READINGS Thurs. 5/23/2013 - 6:30 p.m.
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