Daily Prompt Love <3 She
11 June 2019
Make art about the wisdom of old women, about the dangerous old woman.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Posts tagged ‘women writing’
Monday Must Read! Bully Love by Patricia Murphy
A Must Read by a fabulous poet, Trish Murphy, founder of one of my favorite litmags, Superstition Review ❤ Get this one, y’all. For real.
Patricia Colleen Murphy is a principal lecturer at Arizona State University, where she founded the literary magazine Superstition Review. She is also an alumna of the Department of English’s creative writing program, having graduated with her Master of Fine Arts in 1996.
Bully Love, Patricia Colleen Murphy’s second book, won the 2019 Press 53 Award for Poetry, selected by Poetry Series Editor Tom Lombardo.
Bully Love follows the poet from Ohio to Arizona, from cows and cornfields to the Sonoran Desert, from youth to middle age, from daughter to orphan, from child to childfree, from loneliness to love. As the poet leaves a broken home to build a new life for herself, she struggles to adapt to a land teaming with dangers. Against a searing sunny backdrop, the poems describe how she makes peace with an inhospitable life and landscape as she overcomes hardships such as madness, death, depression, fear, anger, loneliness, heat, and hills. She ultimately finds beauty in the desert Edward Abbey called, “not the most suitable of environments for human habitation.” The poems in Bully Love examine the long-term effects of displacement: a mother displaced from her home by mental illness, a women displaced from the Midwest to the Southwest, a girl scout camp displaced by a Uranium processing plant, desert wildlife displaced by urban sprawl and mining, wilderness displaced by careless tourists, ranches displaced by freeways, solitude displaced by companionship, fear displaced by joy. The collection examines how humans form relationships with both landscapes and lovers, all through the eyes of a woman who leaves a forlorn home, suffers relentless loss, and falls in love in and with one of the world’s harshest ecosystems.
Praise for Bully Love
In this quietly fierce collection of poems, the dynamic between profound longing and clear-eyed testament is palpable everywhere. “And so I will live the rest of my life / just short of rapture,” suggests one poem, but the whole collection is mapped in that instant. And in this world, all things are complicit: the landscape–“From our windows windmills are obedient fan palms”–and the animals–“the Dean Martin of mourning doves”–themselves also necessary characters in these striking life-tellings. Bridging a young view of Ohio with an older eye toward Arizona, these poems search for, if not understanding, redemptive acceptance. –Alberto Rios, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and Arizona Poet Laureate
The austerity of the desert is almost a character in Bully Love, almost a beloved. In leaving the Midwest, a mother’s madness, a family’s dissolution, the poet travels west mythically and actually. “It is easy to be pious when / your life is not on fire” simultaneously invokes human suffering and suggests that faith of any kind–in love or place or God–cannot be gained without it. For some, a desert is a place of baptism: the difficulty of existence clarifies its worth. You don’t need to think of the desert as a place to be reborn–Patricia Murphy has done that for you. –Bob Hicok, author of Hold
“My only power is the ability to name,” one speaker in Patricia Murphy’s new collection, Bully Love, states, but as Murphy richly explores, the power derived from that ability–after all, the power of the poet–is both potent and partial. “What’s that?” another speaker asks, hearing a birdsong she can’t identify on a hike. “Olive warbler? Painted orangestart? Scissor-tailed flycatcher?” Names are invoked like spells to tell the future, wards to face the ghosts of the past. There’s wondrous courage conjured in these crystalline poems, which sparkle with Murphy’s verve, enabling her to confront the hard truth she names: not love but bully love, the effects of which she exorcises in the glorious music of this edgy, dazzlingly sharp-witted and necessary book. –Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth
Happy Reading!
Daily Prompt Love <3 That Fire
20 May 2019
Make art about walking through fire, about surviving the fire.
Sometimes the Day Is the Poem <3
I’ll keep this world from draggin me down.
Daily Prompt Love <3 The Procession
12 May 2019
Make art about the procession of women, about women ancestors, about the shoulders we stand on.
Image by Richard Mcall from Pixabay
Daily Prompt Love <3 That Question
6 May 2019
Make art asking the question you’ve been afraid to ask.
Monday Must Read! Crone by Clare L. Martin
Clare L. Martin’s Seek the Holy Dark was selected as the 2017 Louisiana Series of Cajun and Creole Poetry by Yellow Flag Press. Her debut, Eating the Heart First, was published in 2012 by Press 53. Martin founded and edits the poetry magazine, MockingHeart Review. She lives in Louisiana with her husband and daughter.
Read excerpts and purchase this beautiful book here from NixesMate
Praise for Crone
“Clare Martin’s Crone is a feast for eyes and ears, seductive in its use of both imagery and sound. Celebrating the sometimes terrifying, sometimes life-giving teachings of the wise woman, Crone evokes a woman’s coming-to-power, an epic “cronesong” of spells and potions in the form of poetry.”
–Sheryl St.Germain, author of The Small Door of Your Death.
Clare Martin’s Crone glows equal parts magic, music, and muscle. Her lines are laced with ambergris and jasmine, ghosts and wolfbreath. I would call Martin’s art a gorgeous dream, but that would ignore the blood, bone, and heart that drive this book at its core. Crone is the creation of a poet at the height of her powers, in full voice, and mesmerizing. Immerse yourselves in these lines, friends. You’ll rise from their waters cleansed and awed. —Jack B. Bedell, author of No Brother, This Storm, Poet Laureate, State of Louisiana, 2017-2019
“Clare L. Martin is a mysterious spellcaster. CRONE is a lush and dizzying monster of a poem. Coming through it made me see the world anew.”
Luis Alberto Urrea, author of House of Broken Angels
Special Weekend Call for Submissions <3 Voice of Eve
Voice of Eve Accepting Women’s Poetry and Art
Submissions accepted year-round.
Voice of Eve is a magazine dedicated to women’s poetry and artwork.
“We celebrate women, their spirit, and their expression through art.”
Please read guidelines at www.voiceofeve.net/submissions before submitting.
Monday Must Read! Starlight & Error by Remica Bingham-Risher
Remica Bingham-Risher, a Cave Canem fellow and Affrilachian Poet, is the author of Conversion (Lotus, 2006) winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award and What We Ask of Flesh (Etruscan, 2013). She is currently the Director of Writing and Faculty Development at Old Dominion University. She resides in Norfolk, VA with her husband and children.
Purchase this beautiful book here.
Praise for Starlight & Error
There’s starlight and sunlight – and no error I could find – in this elegant book where the soul shines through every line. Only when we see how richly the poems matter to the poet can they come so close to us – entering with inescapable feeling and authenticity. We believe, and live, what each poem says, because the heart knows truthful detail. Central to our humanistic beliefs are the love of daughter, wife, stepmother, lover. Here, we learn this all over again, and how complex problems like memory become strengths. Only perfect craft can make it all happen, with experience leading the way. Remica Bingham-Risher has written a world-class book of poems. It’s the best of the best in American poetry. This is no imitation. This is the real thing.–Grace Cavalier
 In Starlight & Error, Remica Bingham-Risher redefines the beat of the heart not only in the adult situations of romantic love but also in the adult decisions within the love of family. The scope of her vision helps us see into our own lives with a sharper focus. At a time in America when we need hope the most, this book offers us an open path; we no longer “wonder what other secrets/ we’ve been keeping/ on this side of the world.” Here- in her songs of forgetfulness and of memory, songs of the closed fist and the open palm, songs of regrets and of gratitude-we clearly see a world worth fighting for.–A. Van Jordan
Monday Must Read <3 Siren by Kateri Lanthier
What a BEAUTIFUL book!
Kateri Lanthier‘s work has appeared in numerous journals, including Green Mountains Review, Hazlitt and Best Canadian Poetry 2014. She was awarded the 2013 Walrus Poetry Prize. Her first book of poems is Reporting from Night (Iguana, 2011). She lives in Toronto with her family.
“If you drop your weapons’-grade handshake, I’ll carry your kiss to the car.
Court controversy, skip the altar. What will survive of us is Spring.”
–from “Uncontrolled Burn”
Purchase this gorgeous book here!
Praise for Siren
from Vehicule Press
“Siren, Kateri Lanthier’s astonishing second book, calls us to attention. In her search for what she calls “compelling melancholy,” Lanthier’s new poems not only draw on the ghazal’s history as love poetry but remind readers of the dangerous and alluring quality of the ancient form itself. The siren was a lethal yet seductive figure, and that sense of power—and as well as her fast-taking bemusement at her own reputation—is present in lines that marry unnerving dream logic to emotional fearlessness. Siren is an uncompromising achievement: an original style at once mysterious, witty and musical that refines and clarifies the world in consistently surprising ways.” Call it playing with fire. Call it connect-the-dots lightning.”
“…a heartfelt cry after the shipwreck…a restless and fearless engagement with the world” – Green Mountains Review
“Desire, then, rules these poems. These poems are not sweet. They are remarkably beautiful just to say out loud.” -Hannah Brown, Toronto Review of Books
“Kateri is a full speed poet, no meandering allowed. One minute you’re a grand piano and the next a Formula One engine. Lanthier finds a way so that “coral has osteoporosis” and “The satellite dish and the satellite must weep for their decay.” Lanthier ties these disparate threads together into an information overload, poems ripe with jaw drop.” – Michael Dennis
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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