Taking a Walk in My Animal Hat: Poems (Harmony) - Softcover

Fix, Charlene

Softcover

ISBN 10: 194750407X ISBN 13: 9781947504073

Publisher: Bottom Dog Press, 2018

Synopsis

Charlene Fixin her poems animal subjectsfinds lessons for humanity, though her poems are light, delightful, effervescent, quick-on-their-feet, fleet-footed, with a wit and wonder worthy of Marianne Moore, yet more pendulous (like the dewlaps of a dog) or dew on a spiders web, unfixed and as fleeting as a cicada husk on a flower petal. Fixs humor is earthy, wise, and full of music, the Music of Voles, for example, that is in the cremains of owls fiery furnace, yet singing. So much looking, so much care, that to inhabit Fixs world is to feel gravity of world alwaysthe tragedy, the immensity, beauty, but to do somost often, locally, on the dining room table, to see the power of ones own oats, recognizing father and step-son and son and daughters and dog, and that horse over there, that lamb in the barn at the fair, its humanness, as noted by a sister. One might say these show family values uncorrupted by the conservative abuse of that termfamily values as expressed by a seen-it-all country doctor, or farm vet, or a lighter-lined, slightly quieter, Whitman. In Fix, then, we have a poet with a cinematographers eyean artist who lights, colors, frames and records the visual with lyrical chains of words in place of celluloid images. As with the best cinematographers, her lenses are well ground and polished; her gaze attentive, careful, and intimate; and she sees more than what is visible. In this gentle and humorous volume, Fix goes beyond her animal subjects as representative to each creatures self and tells their inherent stories. Too often with literature the animal hat is donned in service to the human beneath it, but here in these humble, generous lines even the ghost of a flea reminds us "Surprise! Surprise! The flea is thee."

-Joshua Butts, author of New the Lost Coast; Lesley Jenike, author of Holy Island; and Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis, author of The Rub

About this title

Book Description:

Here's a book of poems for those who love animals and those who love words.|Taking a Walk in My Animal Hat

From the Back Cover:

Taking A Walk in My Animal Hat is a tapestry of exquisite poems, phrases and lines that stun, rejuvenate, and have, as Audre Lord hungers for, the potential to 'set us free.' These poems are for those of us weary of what Adrienne Rich terms the atrophy of our power to imagine other ways of navigating into our collective future. Charlene Fixs collection is the antidote to that atrophy. It is a call to don the animal hat," to manifest the state or aspiration of the soul. One poem after another takes us there, always surprisingly.The poetry is knowledgeable, wise, whimsical, challenging, loving, and draws from a wide repertoire paintings, farms, porches, family, the marketplace, loss, life. This collection is a foundation for recovery, for restoration, for inspiration. -Anna Soter, is Professor Emerita at The Ohio State University, author of Breathing Spaces.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bottom Dog Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 194750407X
• ISBN 13: 9781947504073
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 92