Calling

by Sharon Chmielarz

In this collection, Sharon Chmielarz calls up the lives of those, who, in Elisabeth Bishop's words, '...kept calling, calling to each other...' They are known and unknown painters, musicians, the local beautician, islanders and immigrants. They are subjects for our attention, long overdue. These are portrait poems serving as windows into the lives of Monet's egg girl, Galileo's daughter, the Two Fat Ladies. They are a record of the people we come from, recorded in lyric and narrative, with dashes of humor and anger, love and sadness at the irrefutable wash of history the poems find themselves in. They are women who are showcases of strength, reflection, and the ordinary transformed by the desire to be counted. They seek the remembrance due the neglected. The poet s dragnet sweeps them all in.

88 pages, Paperback

Published September 10, 2010