Sunday, February 4, 2024
Her Skin Rearranges the Light
Her Skin Rearranges the Light
Sunday, January 14, 2024
What's New?
New poetry chapbook book "Dreams and Other Magic" published by Alien Buddha Press is available now on Amazon!
Some photos from prior events:
The view from the podium at Poetry the Art of Words, located at Plymouth Center for the Arts.
Saturday, December 2, 2023
One Dream Is Not Enough
Our first meeting was like a dream,
A perfect but impossible encounter
Beneath fluorescent lights
But one dream is not enough
For an entire lifetime, and so
I’ve dreamed of nothing else ever since
Asleep I dream of days spent together,
Of laughter and music and the smells
Of a welcoming kitchen
Awake I dream of sleeping in your arms
And the sweetness of your kiss
And hiding in your tangled hair
Before, my life was only cold reality,
But now it is a warm and loving dream
From which I know I’ll never wake.
Saturday, October 7, 2023
Review: Story & Bone, by Deborah Leipziger, Lily Poetry Review Books
Story & Bone, by Deborah Leipziger, from Lily Poetry Review Books
In her newest collection
of poems (Story & Bone, Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022), Deborah Leipziger
explores all the ways in which she intersects with her world, and thus helps us
all understand the ways in which we intersect with our own. She reveals herself
as daughter, mother, lover, friend; as baker, gardener, poet; as Brazilian,
American, Jew; but most of all as human.
Skillfully reusing phrases and images from one poem to the next, so that one page seems to echo the ones before, Leipziger reminds us of the rhythms and patterns in every life. The most notable example of this is when she speaks of her family’s story of ancestors concealing valuables as they escaped from tyranny: in one poem, “gems into the hems”; in another “gems sewn in hems”; in a third: “gems faceted by stone hidden in garments”. She then calls the very story into question: “Or is it legend / I sing the fiction and non-fiction”.
Or again with multiple
references to her own dangerous birth: “I celebrate my survival / from the umbilical
cord / wrapped around my neck”; and then, “the umbilical cord coiled around my
neck”. She then multiplies the echo through the umbilical connection between
herself and her twin daughters…and further by drawing the comparison between
her own blue complexion at birth and the color of the walls in the room where
she gives birth. Echoes upon echoes.
There
is an almost breathtaking sense of intimacy in this work, a fearless
willingness to share herself with the reader, body and soul, as in:
“I celebrate my nimbus of curls
nipples neck navel”
“I open myself and claim my
openness
I transform and sing
my Evolution”
“I enter with offerings –
Pomegranates and honey dates,
All that I will be is here.
Entering.”
There is an
earth-mother-like quality in the way she shows us a day of making lemonade with
her daughters (Lemonade), or compares the act of picking apples in an orchard
to that of motherhood itself (Apple Orchard), or when she provides the most
spiritual and open-hearted recipe I’ve ever seen anywhere (How to Make a
Challah).
Every page seems to glimmer with its own light, but for me the most sublimely luminescent moment comes in How to Help a Friend Mourn, which opens “For this you will need lemons” and then explains:
“Maybe you won’t have time to grow a lemon
tree
but you have planned for this moment,
this is why you’ve grown a lemon tree.”
As in her earlier work,
there are many floral images here, and when she puts the phrase “A half truth /
to say I painted flowers” into Georgia O’Keefe’s mouth it’s clear she’s
speaking of her own poetry as well. Sometimes a calyx or a spadix are more than
the parts of a flower.
All artists strive to
make their audience feel something. Leipziger succeeds triumphantly. You will
feel her warmth and her wisdom; her strength and her vulnerability; her love of
life and her deep understanding of both its pain and its beauty. This is a
truly lovely book.
Saturday, September 23, 2023
A Tiger in Her Hips
Sunday, September 17, 2023
Another Poem About the Moon
Another poem about the moon
Another song about what you mean to me
I have so much I need to say
About the moon and you and me
You and the moon and me
Side by side by side
Just the way it pulls the sea
Creating the rising and falling tide
It pulls on you and it pulls on me
Until we’re side by side by side
Another verse about the stars
The ones that hang in the midnight sky
And the ones I see shining
There in your eyes
You and the stars are my guiding lights
Hanging in the sky or hanging from your ears
Keep me on my path, day and night
I see you both always, far or near
Shining with a pure silver light
And I feel no fear
Just another song of you
Or another part of the same sweet song
I’ve sung since our love was new
And still my heart beats strong
And still my heart stays true
And still I sing the same sweet song
Of me and the moon and you
Sunday, May 21, 2023
Eternity must be jealous of the present
its immediacy, its relevance.
Yes, eternity must be jealous
when a lover smiles and sighs,
when she removes the clip
which had held back her hair,
freeing it and allowing me
to slip my hand between the strands
as if it were a bolt of priceless silk
which she offers to me
as a queen might offer
alms to a beggar.
My fingers luxuriate gratefully.
This gratitude and luxury
exist only in the present,
and so, eternity is jealous.
Eternity is full of
inconsequentialities
and coincidences.
Full of happenstances
and miscellaneous occurrences.
But only the present contains life.
Only the present contains love.
Only the present contains potentiality and value.
Only the present contains her sweet kiss.
And so, eternity is jealous.