Synopses & Reviews
In this sublime and imposing book of poetry, Barbara Hamby races through the circuitous regions of Heaven and Hell, desire and love, giving shape and significance to the strange and the familiar. Her book ignites with a proclamation, "In the beginning was the word, fanning out into syllables, like a deck of cards on a table in Vegas, lovely leafy parts fluttering into atoms and cells, genus and phylum, nouns and verbs;" an easy metaphor for her intoxicating linguistic machinations.
Hamby's roaming, inquisitive mind reels in the reader, "I'm persuaded the day will come when I'll lie static as a falcon in a hunter's sack, fragments of iron studding my reckless breast." Not limited to the self-referential, Hamby playfully references historic and literary personae, taking stabs at Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the Bible and Casanova. "Who wouldn't," she challenges us, "give anything for the voice of an angel and wings to fly above the rough dirt of birth?"
Review
"Hamby's poems are tsunamis carrying you far out to sea and then back to shore giddy and glad to be alive. She roars around the parabola of the time-space continuum, leaping between the past, both ancient and within memory, and the present, then circles the globe all within a single high-octane couplet. Hamby strings words and worlds together with the gravity-defying momentum of a high-flying dancer or a whirling dervish, traveling to Italy, India, St. Louis, the Amazon, Sante Fe, and Hawaii in long zestful exhalations. She rumbas and stomps and shakes her finger in your face as she writes of war and sex, love and hunger, insomnia, drunkenness, the movies, family, the soul, art, and the devil. Her commentary is hilarious. The sudden moments of stillness found unexpectedly within the rush of her rants are radiant and spellbinding, and the clash between her velocity and her specificity creates a sizzling current of electricity that runs through every dashing, piquant, and diva-sung line." -Donna Seaman,Booklist
Synopsis
This book brings together for the first time many if the leading writers and thinkers from the psychological and mental health fields. Contributes include Robert Jay Lifton, Joanna Macy, Roger Walsh and others.
About the Author
Sylvia Staub, is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Amherst Massachusetts. She is a co-founder of the Western Massachusetts chapter of Psychologists for Social Responsibility and is committed to exploring the connections between psychological theory and practice in the context of global society.
Paula Green is Associate Professor in counseling psychology at Antioch New England Graduate School and maintains a clinical practice. she is currently on the National council of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the International Network of Engaged Buddhists and is director of Karuna Center , which offers workshops in communication, reconciliation, and peacemaking.