Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Beautiful Women Unleashed

"Being essential, authentic, unfazed, theurgical, incandescent, flawed" and "utterly lovable" - is beautiful to Honey Novick, one of the poets in this anthology.

For Katherine L. Gordon beauty begins with love. "Love me as I am / For I am the softness of the world".

Whether you like it or not, says Kim Clark a "Beautiful Woman / is the one / who reflects your worth / [and] magnifies / your joy".

Darryl Knowles lists the strong women we see in history, on the screen, and includes "all the women in this world / who ever gave a f ... k / and never gave up."

Kate Marshall Flaherty remembers learning cursive writing in Grade 4 "under Miss Reed's giraffe lashes, / blinking" for she was the one who inspired her to write.

As a child L. Muirhead "never did want to be a girl / had always fit in with the boys" until her mother insisted it was time to wear a bra. When her brother's friend teased her about it she bloodied his nose.

Angeline Schellenberg's Oma lets down her long hair and suddenly she becomes a young girl again running through the grass.

"Like a soldier marching forward / you fought for independence" writes Debbie Okun Hill in her memorial to the journalist Malvena Hope Morritt.

Shelley Haggard recalls Jackie Ciano whose "vision / that the men who go fishing / create new lines and new knots / that the whales might escape" lived long enough to see the results of her crusade.

Waldemar Ens pays tribute to Feist - "unafraid / taking chances on the edge of disaster / fiery feet dancing on the rooftop ledge".

A mother's wisdom: "there’s no curfew / come home when it’s over / don’t drive fast" is the muse for Franci Louann's haiku.

Can a woman be beautiful when she is laid out in a casket? Louise Carson thinks so -"You model it for us
in sky blue with white hair, / your fastidious fashion sense / intact / before the flame".

Vikash Kumar attributes beauty to the dream "Of another world / A new realm, a divine vista".

Joy Donnell invests beauty in the imagined daughter as the centre of herself  "& find you to be not a woman but a world / walking so high gravity evades".

Beauty has long represented ideals and for Kim Goldberg one ideal is strength, courage: "caked in cow dung and dust, nothing / to slake her burning thirst, her sun-baked / lips, but her own thin spit".

For Vuong Pham, resignation. "rainy night— / somewhere else / the stars shine".

Weighing skin deep beauty with beauty on the inside, Naomi Beth Wakan, asks what "may prevent me being seduced / by a pair of wild brown eyes"?

Can beauty exist within the womb? Pd Lietz writes "moist muscle pulsating / I laboured to be smaller / she implored me to be mightier".

"For in the end it is / to one another that we turn, hands / groping in the dark" writes Ronnie R. Brown.

Heather Brager paints a full circle from the edge of woman-as-object to "the synonym of / protector, the /
reckless bard / a strumpet, girl".

Amen.


Published by Lipstick Press
767 Chelwood Road, RR #1
Gabriola BC V0R 1X1
lipstickpress@shaw.ca
www.lipstickpress.com

ISBN: 978-0-9880043-3-7

$10.00 plus shipping.



4 comments:

Franci Louann said...

It's all good...unleashed indeed! It did arrive in New West. on Thursday!

Janet Vickers said...

Thanks for letting us know Franci. It may take a little longer for those in the US or India.

Franci Louann said...

Janet, wow, congrats on being so international! & Brisbane???

Are there authors in my area - Lower Mainland? Maybe I'll arrange a 'little' launch at Renaissance Books.

Could also possibly do this in Toronto/Stratford/London areas & in Montreal, July/August.

I'll be a feature at Poetry in the Park in New Westminster July 10th.

Kim Goldberg said...

Congrats to all! The book is.. well - beautiful! as one would expect in this case :)

Lipstick Press is not publishing books now

Dear Poets Sorry to let you know we have not been publishing chapbooks since 2010. We did some online publishing - mainly for social iss...