A joy to read, as if she is a wise and witty neighbor

No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

How much I already miss Ursula Le Guin. Her fantasy and sci-fi novels explore what it means to be a human, to be gendered, to live with a natural world instead of against it. This collection of essays from her blog are more personal--and leave me with the illusion that I knew her or at least the wish that she had been my neighbor. Here we watch the natural world together. Here I listen to her thoughts on politics and science vs belief and find myself nodding.

Whether you are already an avid reader of Le Guin or if you are not a fan of sci-fi and fantasy, this collection is thought-provoking, full of heart and joy, and a joy to read.

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Holy Hangover

Still a poem that must be read and reread

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As is true for most readers, when I first encountered The Waste Land in the 1960s, I found myself in a very foreign poetic land. I read the annotations and explications. I listened to my professors. I reread and mad innumerable margin notes. I felt the poem's power and despair. But its meaning seemed hard to parse.

Now, decades later, rereading yet again, I know the poem and the poem knows me. We still live in The Waste Land. The loss of all mooring after WWI still remains a debris we drift with. But the poem itself seems very approachable now, its discordant ballet of voices powerful as ever, but its sense much more apparent to me.

You must read and reread this poem. My critical opinion of it had moved over time to it being overrated---but now, no. It is a seminal poem of the last century. And its relevance today is profound.

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The Muse with on of my poems can be downloaded for Kindle right now at no charge.

The Muse with on of my poems can be downloaded for Kindle right now at no charge.

A vacant mirror looking at itself

Rayfish by Mary Hickman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"There are no feelings in this piece--there is nothing but instinct." So writes Mary Hickman in one of her prose poems in this collection. There seems a craftlessness that is perhaps intended. These seems more stream-of-consciousness essays than prose poems, but I must be wrong. The collection won the Laughlin award after all. "I generally know I am sick the moment I take the photo," she writes, weaving medical procedures with art works, foreign stays with family matters. We wonder what is biographical and what is fantasy--but I do not wonder enough to reread. For me, something is missing. A phantom limb perhaps. A vacant mirror looking at itself?

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In 2017 my poetry was accepted by these 32 journals and e-zines

In 2017 my poetry was accepted by these 32 journals and e-zines:

• 50 Haikus
• Aji Magazine
• Allegro Poetry Magazine
• Burningword Literary Journal
• Chantwood Magazine
• The Deadly Writers Patrol
• Dual Coast Magazine
• Foliate Oak Literary Magazine
• Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review
• GFT Press One in Four
• Glass: A Journal of Poetry
• Gravel: A Literary Journal
• Heron Tree
• The Hungry Chimera
• Into the Void Magazine
• Inwood Indiana
• Literature Today
• The Muse: An International Journal of Poetry
• The Mystic Blue Review
• Piedmont Virginian Magazine
• Poetry Quarterly
• The Ravens Perch
• Red Earth Review
• The Sea Letter
• Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine
• Summerset Review
• Temenos Journal
• Three Line Poetry
• Two Cities Review
• The Voices Project
• The Wayfarer
• The Write Place at the Write Time

My thanks to all the editors.