Please join me and Cathleen Cohen for a virtual poetry reading.
Free registration at:
Main Point Books celebrates new books from Cathleen Cohen and Faith Paulsen
About this event Celebrate new poetry collections from Cathleen Cohen and Faith Paulsen. Cathleen's "Sparks and Disperses," came out in December. Faith's "Cyanometer," with a cover designed by Cathleen, also came out last fall. Both explore life through fragments and kaleidoscopes, a breaking apart and exploration of language, experience, and meaning. The event will be online with registration required through Eventbrite. Books are available through Eventbrite or the store's website, for pickup at the store or shipped anywhere in the U.S. About the books
The poems in Cathleen Cohen's Sparks and Disperses reckon with contemporary life through the perspective of visual artists. Drawing on an ancient Kabbalistic myth of the "shattering of vessels," Cohen explores issues of fracture, healing, and creation; the challenges of poverty, isolation, and the pandemic; and how we can find meaning and joy through artmaking. By building a poetic mural made of cracked ceramics, household items and glass shards, Cohen promotes healing through continuity and hope.
The title, Cyanometer, forms the conceit for Faith Paulsen's book of poems that marvel at the many hues of looking inward and looking back. Urgent images and quick flashes of narrative are given in a language so vital and attentive that the strictures of grammar cannot hold back the rush of sense memory and sudden insight into the nature of self seen from "all directions." What capacious observations of her own self are refracted through those of the rabbit, the elephant, the Marianas Trench, her friends, family and, in the final poems of love and loss, her mother. Like the dragonfly of Pompeii which, "with one beat of its lucent wings / left its mark," so Paulsen leaves hers in poems of reflection, lament, and delight.