Sublime Planet

by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Ann Howley (Photographer)

"Sublime Planet begins with Carolyn Howard Johnson's love poems to the living world, rapturous poems, expansive in spirit yet precise in ‘An impossible moth,/dark eye at its center, opaque//helicopter blades buzz and blur... .’ In Magdalena Ball's darker meditations, hurt and thirst have entered the world facilitated, in part, by the machinations of civilization. While Howard-Johnson's poems praise, Ball's seem to sound a low warning. I recommend Sublime Planet particularly to those individuals who reside on the planet." ~ Suzanne Lummis, UCLA poetry instructor and LA's unique contribution to the poetry worldABOUT THE AUTHORSMAGDALENA BALLMagdalena Ball runs The Compulsive Reader. Her short stories, editorials, poetry, reviews, and articles have appeared in a wide number of printed anthologies and journals, and have won local and international awards for poetry and fiction. Magdalena holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from CCNY (New York), an MBA from Charles Sturt University (NSW, Australia), and has studied literature on a postgraduate level at Oxford University (UK). She lives in on a rural property in New South Wales with her husband and three children. She is also the author of two critically acclaimed novels Sleep Before Evening and Black Cow, a nonfiction book The Art of Assessment, and two poetry books Repulsion Thrust and Quark Soup as well as coauthoring the Celebration Series of chapbooks. Her website is magdalenaball.comVisit The Compulsive Reader at compulsivereader.com/html CAROLYN HOWARD-JOHNSONCarolyn Howard-Johnson’s first novel, This Is the Place, won eight awards. Her book of creative nonfiction, A Collection of Stories Remembered, won three. She has been an instructor for UCLA Extension world-renown Writers’ Program for nearly a decade and her book The Frugal Book Promoter, now in its second edition, was named USA Book News’ Best Professional Book, and was given the Irwin Award. Her second book in the How To Do It Frugally series, The Frugal Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success is also a multi award winner. Her chapbook of poetry Tracings, was named to the Compulsive Reader’s Ten Best Reads list and was given the Military Writers’ Society of America’s Award of Excellence. She is the recipient of the California Legislature’s Woman of the Year in Arts and Entertainment Award, and her community’s Character and Ethics Committee awarded her work promoting tolerance with her writing. She was also named to Pasadena Weekly’s list of 14 “San Gabriel Valley women who make life happen.” She is on the respected Poets & Writers roster of poets. Her website is HowToDoItFrugally.com .She blogs writers resources at Writer’s Digest’s 101 Best Websites pick sharingwithwriters.blogspot.com.ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHERAnn Howley came to photography through her love for travel. She photographs nature, landscape, and travel and has adventured on all seven continents in search of her images. She has trekked on the Inca Trail, to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, to Mount Everest base camp, and walked 500 miles along the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. She has been up close and personal with penguins in Antarctica, polar bears in Canada, and mountain gorillas in Uganda. Ann received a Culture and Arts Honorable Mention from Smithsonian Magazine and has been featured twice in the Member Showcase of North American Nature Photography Association. Her photography was included in Suenos/Yume—Fifty Years of the Art of Dora De Larios which won for Best In Show Book Design by the American Advertising Federation.

105 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 8, 2013

About the author

Carolyn Howard-Johnson brings her experience as a publicist, journalist, marketer, and retailer to the advice she gives in her HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers and the many classes she taught for nearly a decade as instructor for UCLA Extension’s world-renown Writers’ Program. The books in her HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers have won multiple awards. That series includes the flagship book now in its third edition and published by Modern History Press, The Frugal Book Promoter and second edition of The Frugal Editor. Both won awards from USA Book News, Readers’ Views Literary Award, the marketing award from Next Generation Indie Books and others including the coveted Irwin award. How to Get Great Book Reviews Frugally and Ethically launched to rave reviews from Jim Cox, Editor-in-Chief of Midwest Book Reviews and others:

“How to Get Great Book Reviews Frugally and Ethically [and other books in the series] could well serve as a textbook for a college Writing/Publishing curriculum.”

Howard-Johnson is the recipient of the California Legislature’s Woman of the Year in Arts and Entertainment Award, and her community’s Character and Ethics award for her work promoting tolerance with her writing. She was also named to Pasadena Weekly’s list of “Fourteen San Gabriel Valley women who make life happen” and was given her community’s Diamond Award for Achievement in the Arts.

The author loves to travel. She has visited eighty-nine countries and has studied writing at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom; Herzen University in St. Petersburg, Russia; and Charles University, Prague.

Reviews

[Rochelle Jewel Shapiro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Travel the world with award-winning novelist, non-fiction writer, and poet, Californian Carolyn Howard-Johnson, as she looks, not as a tourist, but a naturalist poet, peering closely, translating everything into matters of the heart. In Teaching Elizabeth, she writes, "I breathe airy sequins into the Rocky light." Half this book is authored by Magdalena Ball, an award-winning Austrailian poet, novelist, reviewer who studied, Post grad, at Oxford and now lives in rural Southwest Wales. She's the originator of the hightly respected compulsivereader.com Her poems are cautionary without getting preachy. In Alien Life, a poem about water, she moves into sci-fi as she admonishes us about wasting water.

Drink now
slowly
with the knowledge
that throughout the universe
aliens everywhere
your distant stardust relations
thirst.

AND, DID I MENTION THAT ALL MONEY FROM THE SALE OF THIS BOOK GOES TO THE WWF: THE WORLD WILDLIFE FUND?

[Johnny · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have never read a poetry book before, but since I kinda "know" Magdalena Ball I was perfectly willing to give this a try. While I realized poetry will never be a big thing for me, I did enjoy most of it, though a lot certainly went over my head.

Carolyn Howard-Johnson's poems should be read in the middle of a forest or meadow, or on the top of an Austrian mountain range. You can perfectly read it at home, but then you'll imagine the walls slowly being overgrown by plants, the walls crumbling to ruins as nature conquers over civilization. In any case, you need to read them in absence of engine noises, electronic music, the hum of industry. These poems applaud nature.

Magdalena Ball's half of the book is a bit different and with these poems I felt a sense of loss, of loneliness, of a search for some connection that isn't there and will possibly never come. With most of them I had a harder time making sense of them, but with others I felt a deep, personal connection as if they had been gripped out of my life. "Word Wall" is easily my favorite.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Celebration of Earth

Our world is both magnificent and terrible. These poems celebrate both aspects. I delighted in the lush images of places I've loved seeing them through the eyes of someone who loved them, too: Santa Ana winds, poppies, the plains of Kansas. There are also harsh poems like “Trash Tree” that show us the dark side of ourselves and the world.

My favorite is “The Man I Love and the Writing Spider” because it's so close to my own experience. I watch the spider build a web of silver threads delighting in the intricacy, but when it leaves the web and wants to come inside, it becomes the enemy. I want to squash it, but I'm grateful when some braver person rescues it and gives it another chance at life or death.

The poems not only invite you to relive sensuous experiences, but they make you think about the world, how important it is, and how we need to care for it. The book is a wonderful gift for Earth Day. A good time to meditate on the magnificence of the world.

[Debbie Robson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sublime Planet, a collection of poetry by Magdalena Ball and Carolyn Howard-Johnson is both a celebration of the wonderful planet we live in and a reminder to all of us that we must never take it for granted! This is a very balanced collection - erudite yet lyrical. "
…DNA you gave up
in ashes, nature's hardiest gift"

Favourite poems:
The Impervious Stones of Malta
The Giraffe
Endangered Species
Hedge
These Heavy Sands
Plane Strain

[Carolyn Wilhelm · Rating 5 out of 5]

This award-winning book helps the reader notice more details about our beautiful world and nature. Such writing takes time to ponder. One reading won't do. Although not a long book, I will be thinking about it for a long time. It will call me back to reread.

[Malobi Sinha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought the book is very well written and the poetry quite energetic - some of the scientific expressions went past my head as I did not have the background for them. Well worth the read