Beach Cardiology by Franci Louann

Lipstick Press is pleased to announce Franci Louann's first chapbook, Beach Cardiology, a collection of poems covering five decades and four continents.

The title refers to the dreams and hopes that expire unrequited, and turn to stone on a beach somewhere.

The first stanza of the eponymous piece, which appears on the back of the cover:

all of the stones
on this beach
are shaped
like hearts

appears at first, to be optimistic, hopeful, as though everything on the beach where land ends and the ocean begins, is in tune with the human heart. However the final stanza reveals the fear that follows hope.

The heart sees signs in everything. The  poem titled "That Night" is about openings in images and relationships when Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party comes to town, foreshadowing the meeting of a new love.

In these poems, inanimate objects predict what the mind doesn't want to allow. The backpack foretells the end of an affair, the half moon announces the ache for the missing half, a Palestinian scarf becomes a flag when a rabbi and his family walk by.

Franci Louann was born in Stratford, Ontario, (known then as Frances Louann Workman) and moved to the West Coast in the late sixties. Her poems have appeared in Woman’s Eye: 12 BC Poets (edited by Dorothy Livesay, Vancouver: Air, 1974), various other publications, in print and online, and have won prizes from Pandora’s Collective, Burnaby Writers’ Society, and the Vancouver Folk Music Festival 25th Anniversary Memorable Moments contest. In 2007, she received World Poetry’s Volunteer Media Award, and was appointed World Poetry Ambassador to Australia and New Zealand 2009-2010.

Lipstick Press
767 Chelwood Road, RR #1
Gabriola BC V0R 1X1

lipstickpress@shaw.ca
http://www.lipstickpress.com/

ISBN: 978-0-9781204-8-1

Cover photo © 2010 Franci Louann
24 pages

$8 plus shipping
To order send an email to lipstickpress@shaw.ca