This week’s other featured books, “Endings & Beginnings,” by DeWitt Henry, and “The Anatomist’s Tale,” by Tauno Biltsted, can be found by scrolling down below this post, or by clicking the author’s name on our Authors page.
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THE BOOK: she-oak
PUBLISHED IN: 2019
THE AUTHOR: Linda Goin.
THE EDITOR: Paul Grimsley was the editor, layout artist, cover designer, and publisher.
THE PUBLISHER: Musehick Publications.
SUMMARY: The she-oak is indigenous to Australia. It is not an oak but resembles a pine that has a woody fruit instead of a pinecone. The poems in this chapbook focus on “she”, or any woman. They, like the she-oak, are ambiguous and undefinable.
THE BACK STORY: I was participating in several poem-a-day (PAD) challenges over several years and had hundreds of poems that I could pull together to create a chapbook. But I didn’t have a theme until my friend, Paul, in Australia, told me about a dream he had about the two of us. I wrote a poem about our relationship and built a theme around the premise of his dream, which was ambiguous yet pointedly plant-based.
WHY THIS TITLE?: See above.
WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? I like to have fun with words, and sometimes readers catch my double meanings, sometimes they catch the poetry tools such as internal rhyme and metaphor. All that aside, it’s a short book – 40 pages – and the poems are no longer than a page. A reader could absorb the work in one sitting or read a poem a year for 40 years.
REVIEW COMMENTS: I have no reviews. Just one five-star rating. The book is over at Good Reads, where the Ohio Beat Poet Laureate for 2019-2021, John Burroughs, gave it five stars. My publisher also gave it five stars. As you can see, I’m an acquired taste.
AUTHOR PROFILE: I began writing poetry in the early 1990s, and had a poem accepted in an anthology that paid $100 for the piece. I was married to a poet/writer at the time, and I got the distinct feeling that he and his writing group did not take anyone seriously who didn’t have a master’s degree. So I divorced him and obtained a master’s degree in history. That college experience really did teach me how to write, and I have made a good living with that skill over the years; however, my first love is poetry. I have thousands of poems that all need revision. Perhaps that’s what I’ll do in 2022. Revise and publish.
AUTHOR COMMENTS: This first chapbook, she-oak, is a statement of sorts about the ambiguity assigned to women and that women assign to themselves. “She” in the third person, “she” as the other, “she” who remains nameless, yet who experiences so many feelings through loss and success. I hope readers can put a name to “she” in the process of reading these poems. If not, that’s fine…if an impression is made. That’s all any one of us really want, isn’t it? To leave an impression.
SAMPLE: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51481738-she-oak https://www.amazon.com/she-oak-Linda-Goin/dp/1944864547/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=she-oak&qid=1622727103&sr=8-3
WHERE TO BUY IT: Only available on Amazon.
PRICE: Currently at $13; currently no used edition for sale on Amazon.
CONTACT THE AUTHOR: lindagoin@gmail.com
Snowflakes in a Blizzard 