If you haven’t got a copy of my new book, Gods of Water and Air, I’m offering a hefty discount. It’s a book with poetry, prose, and even This collection has prose a once-act play (about the afterlife of dogs). 135 pages of summer reading — a deal! This price is good through July 31! Email me (rachel@dacushome.com) to order one direct, for only $11.00 + shipping. (Amazon charges $2 more.) Here’s a taste. –>Life…
Happy Fourth! If you haven’t got a copy of my new book, Gods of Water and Air, I’m offering a hefty discount on Gods of Water and Air to celebrate midsummer. This collection has prose as well — even a small play. Email me (rachel@dacushome.com) to order one direct from me, for only $11.00 + shipping (135 pages — a deal!). Or you can get it from Amazon. Here’s a taste. From “Prayers for Everywhere”:…
The only way to sanely start a week, if you’re a poet, is with metaphor. Reading to start and revising is the juice. I have three inches of print drafts to plow through, how many e-files, and am grabbing summer by the shorthairs to make a space for poetry. I need to make a fresh pile of worked-up stuff, need time and peace. Hedging my priorities. Here’s one from Gods of Water and Air. Have…
If you haven’t got a copy of my new book, out last fall from Aldrich Press, I’m offering a hefty discount on Gods of Water and Air to celebrate midsummer. Madness indeed, but it’s not about money, it’s about poetry. This collection has prose as well — even a small play. Email me (rachel@dacushome.com) to order one direct from me, for only $11.00 (135 pages — a deal!). Here’s a taste — animated and read…
Last night I saw the best play about Emily Dickinson I could imagine. It was a musical, and it was performed by fifth grade actors who brought this luminous ecstatic poet (“the Myth” as she was sometimes called) to life. It also brought to vivid life her bustling, growing Amherst (“the only thing silent in Amherst is the ‘h’”). Written by my brilliant playwright friend Judith Nielsen, music composed by a young and talented composer,…
Memorial Day began as a way to honor soldiers who died in the Civil War. Coincidentally, Walt Whitman’s birthday was a few days ago. One year, I wrote him a birthday poem, after having seen a play about him. The play movingly used his own lines to express his witnessing and nursing of the suffering soldiers. Today I’m grateful for Whitman’s moving tributes to the hundreds of thousands who made their sacrifice in our Civil…
Thanks to all who participated in my Great Poetry Book Giveaway this year! I picked names out of the numerical hat and sent a copy of my Gods of Water and Air to one winner and Stanley Kunitz’s book Passing Through. I noticed we all entered each other’s Poetry Book Giveaways. It was a pleasure to read blogs I hadn’t visited and learn about books I will now buy. In the giving spirit, I’m offering…
Lovely day here, the breezy and brilliant kind of spring day I imagined from Monet’s painting, after which I wrote my poem. The traveling exhibition “Monet in Normandy” visited the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco some years ago and it inspired me to write back to several of the paintings. Bought the book too, so I can keep talking back to Monet — or rather, asking questions, as in this poem. Do you ever talk…
I’m delighted that IthacaLit, that fine litmag out of Ithaca, NY and piloted by poet Michele Lesko, has published Barbara Ellen Sorensen’s interview with me, as well as a couple of my new poems. Barbara’s interview focused on topics of importance to us both: imagination, creativity, and spirituality. Barbara, author of the recent collection Compositions of the Dead Playing Flutes, asked me questions that made me dig down into my sources. I especially liked thinking…
As a writer and occasional book reviewer, I’m so impressed by the close reading given my book Gods of Water and Air by poet Ann Wehrman. Her review in The Pedestal Magazine got deeply inside my subjects and even gave me perspective on the way I write. Wehrman took the trouble to put me into a context. Using info from my website’s bio — a reviewer who does research!– she contextualized me as a California-raised…