I love following Jade Nicole Beals’ sensitive book reviews, creative writing and art, so I am thrilled to read her review of Rooted and Winged on her blog.
You can find it here:
Tag Archives: Poetry
Next Stop on the Rooted and Winged Blog Tour: Interview by Anthony Avina
The newest stop on the Rooted and Winged blog tour by Poetic Book Tours is an interview of me by Anthony Avina.
You can find it here:
A Lovely Review of Rooted and Winged
A huge thank you to Sheila Morris for her lovely review of Rooted and Winged on her blog. I tried to reblog, but my reblog button doesn’t work right, so here is the link!
Next Stop on the Rooted and Winged Blog Tour: A Winged Guest Post
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.
You can find it here:
I love how The Bookworm interacted with my guest post, too.
On the same (loose) topic of “wings,” I got a shot this week of one of my winged favorites. Our delightful dragonflies in Arizona are bright orange.
The gardener and I are back from a trip to Bass Lake and Yosemite. I’ll tell you about it in a future post!
Next Stop on the Rooted and Winged Blog Tour
I hope that you will follow the Rooted and Winged blog tour by Poetic Book Tours. Today’s post can be found here:
For the tour schedule, check out the tour website:
https://poeticbooktours.wordpress.com/2022/08/27/rooted-and-winged-by-luanne-castle-sept-oct-2022/
Please Join the Rooted and Winged Blog Tour Now in Session
I hope that you will follow the Rooted and Winged blog tour by Poetic Book Tours. Today’s post can be found here:
For the tour schedule, check out the tour website:
https://poeticbooktours.wordpress.com/2022/08/27/rooted-and-winged-by-luanne-castle-sept-oct-2022/
New Poems Up at Sheila-Na-Gig Online
Grateful to Sheila-Na-Gig online journal and editor Hayley Mitchell Haugen for publishing two of my wolf poems. These poem are not in Rooted and Winged, but rather in a future project. I really love these poems (haha) and hope you do, too.
Both poems are “how to” poems:
*”How to Make a Hand Shadow Wolf”
*”How to Digest the Wolf”
I hope you’re having a lovely holiday weekend and that you join me for the Rooted and Winged blog tour beginning September 15.
Filed under #poetrycommunity, art journaling, Literary Journals, Poetry, Publishing
Find Me at Substack Today . . . and a New Poem at Verse-Virtual
After getting feedback from y’all (I so prefer y’all to the Michigan “you guys” I was brought up with) I probably will start to ease into Wednesday posting at some point. First, though, the blog tour for Rooted and Winged begins. Poetic Blog Tours schedule starts Thursday, September 15 and lasts through October.
Today you can check out my 100 words on writer Amie McGraham’s substack blog Micro Mashup where every post is 100 words. https://morningpagemashup.substack.com/p/keep-it-100-cbe Feel free to comment over at Amie’s site.
Also, the online community literary journal Verse-Virtual has published one of the Rooted and Winged poems about my maternal grandmother here: https://www.verse-virtual.org/2022/September/castle-luanne-2022-september.html Thanks to editor Jim Lewis.
If you would like to interview me for Rooted and Winged or have me write a guest post for your blog, please don’t be shy.
Let’s make it a good weekend!
Announcing the Winner and Finalists of The Rooted and Winged Writing Contest
Judging for Writer Site’s Rooted and Winged Writing Contest is completed. The winner of the contest and of the $250 award is Merril D. Smith for her poem “How I Learned”!
How I Learned
recurring patterns, star shapes
and spirals, leaves and shells are echoes,
the vibrations and reverberations of before-time
the ineffable radiance, the glimmering streams
whose crystalline traces created
seas and a world
where we swim before we can fly—
fractals that connect past and future.
Birds sing the harmonies of stars,
trees and seas bear primeval secrets,
tremulous whispers flow underground and
across continents, waves of knowledge
break on fallow shores,
snippets coast on spindrift,
we feel the droplets, taste the salt, hear only susurration--
perhaps we understood once,
the whispers, the songs, the patterns,
like puzzle pieces, fragments
I have glimpsed,
in a dream,
a tightrope journey over a dark, uncharted crevasse
my arms outstretched for balance,
and then
free-
falling
upside-down and in-between
the visible and the unknown--
but my ancestors spread wings
that covered centuries
to catch me, guide me,
You can, they said
as they showed me that I have my own wings—
unfold them, fly. This, too, is part of the pattern.
The finalists, in no particular order, are:
*Jess L. Parker
*Serena Agusto-Cox
*Stephanie L. Harper
The finalists will be receiving a Rooted and Winged tote bag. Congratulations to all three because the scores were very close.
A HUGE THANK YOU TO THE CONTEST JUDGES!
K.E. Ogden is a two-time judge for the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Prize and a two-time winner of the Academy of American Poets Henri Coulette Memorial Prize from Cal State Los Angeles. Her debut collection of poems, What the Body Already Knows, is winner of the Finishing Line Press New Women’s Voices poetry prize and is in presale now [[https://tinyurl.com/keogdenFLP]]to be released September 2022. Her poems, essays, and fiction have been published in Kenyon Review Online, Brevity, anderbo, Claudius Speaks, Louisiana Literature and elsewhere, and her plays have been staged at several university theaters. A typewriter lover and avid book artist, her digital quilt piece “My President: A Politics of Hope” was published by writer Gretchen Henderson as part of the “Unstitched States” project [[https://unstitchedstates.com/]] . Ogden lives in Los Angeles where she teaches at Pasadena City College and in the Young Writers at Kenyon program each summer in Gambier, Ohio. Visit her on the web at kirstenogden.com [[https://www.kirstenogden.com]]
Suanne Schafer was born in West Texas at the height of the Cold War. Her world travels and pioneer ancestors fuel her writing. A genetic distrust of happily-ever-afters gives rise to strong female protagonists who battle tough environments and intersect with men who might—or might not—love them. A DIFFERENT KIND OF FIRE depicts an early 20th century artist in West Texas while HUNTING THE DEVIL explores the plight of an American physician during the Rwandan genocide. BIRDIE looks at women’s rights in the 19th century through the eyes of a teenage girl committed to an insane asylum. Suanne has served as an editor for a mainstream/romance publishing house and fiction editor for a literary magazine as well as freelance editing. Follow her on https://twitter.com/SuanneSchafer, https://www.instagram.com/suanneschafer/ and https://sanneschaferauthor.com.
Elizabeth Gauffreau writes fiction and poetry with a strong connection to family and place. She holds a BA in English/Writing from Old Dominion University and an MA in English/Fiction Writing from the University of New Hampshire. Recent fiction publications include Woven Tale Press, Dash, Pinyon, Aji, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, and Evening Street Review. Her debut novel, Telling Sonny, was published in 2018. Her debut poetry collection, “Grief Songs: Poems of Love & Remembrance,” was published by Paul Stream Press in September 2021. Learn more about her work at https://lizgauffreau.com.
Review of a Treasure: Millicent Borges Accardi’s Through a Grainy Landscape
The title of Millicent Borges Accardi’s new poetry collection Through a Grainy Landscape is from a quote by Tiago Araújo about driving at night where the view has been altered by the “dim and orangey lights” and from the final poem of the book, which explores the journey of living in a world where “walls / built across artificial boundaries” harms even children.
The poems of this book spring from strong influences on Accardi and her writing: Portuguese culture and the Portuguese diaspora; her childhood as the daughter of immigrants, and her mother, a lively figure in party dresses and good times. Accardi says that the poems were inspired by writing by “Portuguese-American writers and Portuguese writers in translation.” I have not read these muses and mentors, but appreciate the wellspring and focus they give the collection.
“It was my Mother who Taught me to Fear,” gives you an idea of what to expect from Through a Grainy Landscape:
The irregular verbs of culture that brought the family away from The Azores, to the promised land of California, was, were been. Shocking like a past to push away And start over born, born/borne. As if invisibility could be Run away from, a new start in the garage of an uncle, after a cross-country railroad trip like pioneers, Los Angeles was away from beat, and was beaten down, the promised land was to become became, begin, a location that pushed away and helped folks to start over, pretending you were someone else to fight, fought, fought. To flee, fled. To approach a way to make-over, redo, make-believe. To start again. As if half-life never happened. Not the Great Depression of your grandmothers, or the Great War, with its aircraft carriers and new breed of how to be and what to do. California was a gifted promise for the melting pot generation, goodbye to bend (bent, bent) into shape. As the train car runs through every state in the union, interwoven, interwoven in a pattern called starting over, in a safe place with a brand new method of keeping, kept, kept. Where no one genuflected on Sundays, kneel (knelt/kneeled, knelt/kneeled). to recreate yourself from nothing is a wonderful thing. Time were, you almost believed it was possible.
Accardi’s collection is a treasure, both for its specific context within Portuguese-American literature and because it responds to the perspective that the United States is a country of immigrants and the descendants of immigrants. I even learned a favorite new word: saudade, which means “a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia that is supposedly characteristic of the Portuguese or Brazilian temperament” (Oxford Languages). This poetry collection left me with something akin to that feeling.
Through a Grainy Landscape is available HERE.
I remind those of you who preordered Rooted and Winged that the writing contest ends on Wednesday, July 27. That’s the last day you can submit a flash fiction, flash nonfiction, or poem that addresses the prompt in the guidelines. See HERE.
Before too long I will write about the two new cats living at my house. For now I will say that integrating them is a work in progress! Perry is helping me, of course.
Filed under #amreading, #poetrycommunity, #writingcommunity, Book Review, Poetry, Poetry book, Poetry Collection
