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Julia Carlson | Barbara Thomas

Chapbooks
The Turn of The Century by Julia Carlson The Turn of the Century

Review of The Turn of the Century by Doug Holder

Leave it to Somerville poet and publisher Gloria Mindock to come up with a chapbook press branded ”Cloudkeeper,” and to recruit a high caliber poet like Julia Carlson. Carlson, who is the fiction editor of the Wilderness House Literary Review, obviously has a serious talent for poetry, as evidenced by her collection: “The Turn of the Century.” This poetry hits the reader hard and square, with the power of a Punk Rock riff. Carlson, an old Punk Rocker of Boston’s notorious “Rathskeller”- club vintage, takes stabs at the tender underbelly of contemporary society and draws blood. In the poem: “Hotel Caribe, San Juan,” Carlson paints a scathing portrait of “Ugly Americans.”

Cover art "Fortress" by Karl Stevens. Whatever, Steven's strip, runs weekly in the Boston Phoenix, and his graphic novel, Guilty, is available at NE Comics. www.indyworld.com/stevens


These beefy men
Sell aluminum siding
In Topeka or Duluth
They wear their blazers to the beach
Their wives are plump and fashionable
The men look at every woman but their wives
The wives watch the black boys
Sweeping up the sand
What any one of them
Wouldn’t give
For some wild
Rum-drenched episode
To not write home about.”

And here is a right-on-the-money description of a café society party full of the requisite number of poseurs and ciphers. (“Dinner with the Ruling Class.”)

“As the evening progresses through descriptions of bad haircuts…
Cleaning ladies who never clean the house the way they would
Shopping sprees, bankruptcies (not theirs, someone else’s)
Unhappy relationships, therapy, yoga, personal trainers
And unambitious/drunk/cheating husbands or wives
(not theirs, someone else’s)
I get plastered and caught in this sticky bullshit.
I feel like I’m sealed in plastic wrap bound with duct tape
Gasping and suffocating in drivel so pure it hurts.
I hate these people who are so tolerant of me and my boozy state
These people who think I am “cool”
I deeply despise them
And, despite the fact they’re footing the bill
Or perhaps because of it, I will never show them mercy.”

Carlson is a member in good standing of the “Bagel Bards,” a writers’ group that meets in Somerville/Cambridge, Mass. throughout the year. She doesn’t often talk about her poetry—this is a gal who likes to keep it close to her vest. Don’t mess with her, and for Christ sakes, keep it down and let her write!

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/Oct 2007/Somerville, Mass.

Julia Carlson's poetry has recently appeared in Bagel Bards Anthology I & II, Wilderness House Literary Review and Lyrical Somerville. She was a 2001 recipient of a Davis-Kidd Poetry Award, and is Fiction Editor of WHLR.

"THE TURN OF THE CENTURY"
Review by Irene Koronas

I will twirl, and twirl and twirl throughout my life
and I will fall fall fall drifting down
finally shook from the branches one last time

Julia Carlson bites off the head of illusion. She shows us the reality of her generation within a century, like all centuries searching for what and how to become more human and the struggle of being actual.

the shed now filled with the odor
of blood, urine, and wool

This small book of poems, a bible cut from the cloth that clothes all of us, wraps us in rough wool, takes us out of hewn caves; at last we begin to see ourselves as characters born from material needs.

I wanted to be a tap dancer a ballerina a theatre
usher a housewife a guardian angel an editor.

and from her poem, anorexia;

as if they skipped
the blossom-time entirely
and proceeded straight on
to the withering and drying up

Carlson's first soft book speaks with a loud and clear voice. I followed every word, looking for answers to this life. What I found was and is a master telling us to write our own poems. This chapbook is worth more than the seven dollar charge, you will come away with a sense of how a poem can enlighten and can become. The truth is Carlson's poems brought me to my knees in the same way some of the great Russian novelist did.

bravo
Irene Koronas

Seduced by Sighs of Trees by Barbara Thomas

Seduced by Sighs of Trees

In "Seduced by Sighs of Trees," the poet reveals a strong sense of place. These poems that take place in the Northeast, the American West and Greece reflect the poet's unique personal experience: whether a description of childhood in rural Connecticut or an ode to baklava, she uses fresh imagery to convey her deep affinity to nature and spirituality in the natural world.

Review

'Seduced by Sighs of Trees,' Barbara Thomas measures her early years in a natural uncluttered environment. She captures the landscape, "…a weeping willow memory…in the twilight of summer days." The reader becomes immersed in the changeless thoughts derived from her beginnings through to the present experiences the poet expresses, connecting her surroundings, a sublime view. These poems are snapshots taken initially with an instamatic camera and presently, photos taken with a cell phone, in exotic places from which the poets ancestors came. "caressed by blue, soothed by sunsets, we belong there, in those lazy afternoons, my father and I." We get a taste from, "ode to baklava," the Greek pastry made for special occasions.

This is Thomas' first printed collection of poems, an intimate look, the caress of natures fruit, family, trees and "I drift with ebb and flow of tides." A chapbook in bloom - not to be missed, "by the radiance of springs forgiveness."


Irene Koronas
Poetry editor
Wilderness House Literary Review