Before I talk about the tour, editor James Lewis so kindly published three of my Rooted and Winged poems in Verse-Virtual‘s March issue: https://www.verse-virtual.org/2023/March/castle-luanne-2023-march.html I hope you like these poems. “Gravity” is about my grandfather gardening in the muck of Kalamazoo. Yes, muck. That is the wet black soil that Kalamazoo is known for, which is why Kalamazoo is known for being the Celery City.
I’m thrilled to announce the blog tour for my new poetry chapbook Our Wolves which features poems about the Red Riding Hood story. You can find out about the tour here: https://poeticbooktours.wordpress.com/2023/02/20/our-wolves-by-luanne-castle-spring-2023/ I hope you’ll follow along!!!The paperback book is published by Alien Buddha Press and will be available starting this Sunday for $10.99.
Bloggers: if you would like to piggyback onto the tour in the month of March, I would be happy to share an ARC (Advanced Reader Copy pdf) of the chapbook in the hopes that you will like it enough to review it on your blog and on Amazon (and any other social media sites you care to) in March. If so, please let me know.
The Rooted and Winged blog tour has been a lot of fun. I thought I would put all the links to early reviews, as well as the interviews and guest posts.
The last stop on the Rooted and Winged blog tour by Poetic Book Tours is a guest post I wrote about how important it is to write slant when writing poetry. I also share some ideas on how to do so.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the guest posts and interviews on the blog tour. I’m always open to more interactive blog experiences related to my new book haha.
If you’ve been so kind to read Rooted and Winged I beg you to leave a review at Amazon. Even if it’s only one or two sentences it really helps. If you are on Goodreads, please consider pasting the review over there as well.
The newest stop on the Rooted and Winged blog tour by Poetic Book Tours is a guest post I wrote exploring the images of roots and wings in my new book Rooted and Winged.
Today’s stop on the Rooted and Winged blog tour by Poetic Book Tours is an interview of me by The Book Connection. The photos I am sharing here of my maternal grandparents (in Kalamazoo) are to complement the interview.
Grandma with baby me: this is the grandmother in poems like “Spotlight” and “Your Foot Bone Connected to Your Heart Bone”With Grandpa at my 2nd birthday party: this is the grandfather in “Gravity” and “Spotlight”
The newest stop on the Rooted and Winged blog tour by Poetic Book Tours is a guest post I wrote about birds, poetry, and a particular bird in my new book Rooted and Winged.
Today I am participating in Serena Agusto-Cox’s Poetic Book Tours hoopla for Sherry Quan Lee’s new poetry collection Septuagenarian. The title is not a word I am familiar with, but I looked it up and it means a person who is from 70-79 years old. How many times have you heard a collection “boast” that the poet is an older person, especially a woman? Not very darn often.
The summary provided by the poet gives a good idea of her focus in the book: “Septuagenarian: love is what happens when I die is a memoir in poetic form. It is the author’s journey from being a mixed-race girl who passed for white to being a woman in her seventies who understands and accepts her complex intersectional identity; and no longer has to imagine love. It is a follow-up to the author’s previous memoir (prose), Love Imagined: a mixed-race memoir, A Minnesota Book Award finalist.”
In the case of Sherry Quan lee, the term “mixed-race” means that her father was Chinese and her mother was African-American or, more accurately, 3/4 AA and 1/4 white. Quan Lee’s mother preferred to pass as white, and she tried to get her children to do so as well. This wasn’t always easy because it created secrets and lies “Mama said, / cover yourself with lies“), such as seen in the poem “Silence”:
one of us had thick curly hair like Mother’s, one of us
had silky straight hair like Father’s; and, yes, one was
beauty and one shame/hotcombs and gas flames and
it was complicated pretending
Quan Lee’s father also wanted to be white, she asserts. Sadly, her father abandoned the family when Quan Lee was five years old.
One of the most poignant poems is “Mother’s and Mine,” which writes about bruising from 28 different perspectives. Tellingly, she writes in #19, “When I stopped wanting what I couldn’t have, I bruised less often.”
This book appears to have been written during the pandemic. It contains some pieces from previous work published by the poet, as well as new work responding to a “woke” perspective. (In fact, she uses that expression to describe how she has learned from living to be 72 in the poem “I Woke to This Place”). It’s sort of a cobbling together of her past with her now-experienced outlook. I love that she included photographs, especially her adorable cover photos, as well as her birth certificate. It really adds to the authenticity by helping document what Sherry Quan Lee’s life has been like. Reading the experiences of a woman who has gone through life differently than myself was fascinating. Because the poetic style is more literal and less figurative than I usually choose to read, I read this book more as an engaging and inspirational memoir than a poetry collection. Sherry Quan Lee’s story needed to be documented and shared, and I am so blessed that I was asked to read her book.
Imprint:
Modern History Press
Author:
Sherry Quan Lee
ISBN-13:
PB 978-1-61599-568-4 / HC 978-1-61599-569-1 / eBook 978-1-61599-570-7
List Price:
PB $ 17.95 / HC $ 25.95 / eBook $ 4.95
Trim:
6 x 9 (100 pp)
Audience:
General Adult
Pub Date:
03/01/2021
BISAC:
Poetry/Women Authors
Poetry/American/Asian American
Social Science/Ethnic Studies/Asian American Studies