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Les Fauves by Barbara Crooker 192 pages/62 poems Language: English ISBN-10: 1936196697 ISBN-13: 978-1936196692 Price: $16.00 Publisher: C&R Press (January 15, 2017) To Order ABOUT THE BOOK: Les Fauves is, as the title suggests, a collection of ekphrastic poetry, meditations on paintings from the Fauve and Post-Impressionist movements. But it also contains poetry's equivalent to Fauvism, poems that take a walk on the wild side. There are language experiment poems, poems of word play, poems in form both usual (end rhymes, sonnets, ghazals) and unusual (abecedaries, traditional, embedded, and double helix), palindromes, anagrams, and word scrambles. Crazy word salad poems. Crooker's subjects range widely, from living and working in a small village in the South of France, love in a long-term relationship, food as more than sustenance, faith in a secular age, grammar and usage, the pains and pleasures of the aging body. But always, what engages her most is what it means to be human on this fragile planet, at this time in our troubled history, still believing that "Beauty will save the world." (Fyodor Dostoevsky). ADVANCE PRAISE: Barbara Crooker's images, metaphors, and music are so enjoyable that we are shocked when she cuts close to the bone. And yet we knew she would, because she is a serious poet, detailing both time and space. Poetry lives in her. Here she focuses on Les Fauves, the "wild beasts," a group of painters in sync with one another. They did not just stand the test of time; they defined time. Crooker's extra- ordinary ability to write lines that float on air, examine the ekphrastic poem, and drift downstream on lily pads open for us that world, that glorious and exhilarating world. You will return to this book repeatedly because it is alive. ‐Kelly Cherry, author of The Life and Death of Poetry: Poems Barbara Crooker's Les Fauves speaks for all of us who feel there's been a big mistake: we were meant to be born in Paris, to have grown up eating baguettes in the shadow of the book stalls on the Seine‐ yet somehow here we are in Cleveland or Duluth or Pittsburgh, eating cheeseburgers and watching Fox News. What went wrong? This sense of cosmic injustice fuels these beautiful meditations on food and art, language and love. But if her subject is France, in all its sensual splendor, her sensibility is pure Keatsian, passionately in love with "this sweet, sweet world." Barbara Crooker makes me believe‐with gratitude‐that if we live well and attentively our lives will grow even richer, even sweeter, as we age into our autumns. ‐George Bilgere, author of Imperial Because Barbara Crooker's poems read easily, it can be easy to overlook the masterly craft of her work. For example, in her latest volume Les Fauves, Crooker is a standout with the monorhyme ("Scrimshaw") and the abecediary ("Alpha/Omega: Double Helix," "This American Life"). She is like someone who has memorized a sonnet who can recite it nonchalantly at a moment's notice. Crooker also shares a sensibil- ity with many of the artists she writes about, as in Vincent Van Gogh's "The Flowering Orchard, 1888": "I want to be bathed in this radiance, / live here in a corner of the picture, raise / my face to the glow like the overhead light / in my mother's kitchen, and never grow old.' Crooker's special gift is that she makes you fall in love with the world over and over again. ‐Kim Bridgford, Director of Poetry by the Sea, Editor of Mezzo Cammin, author of The Human Interest ABOUT THE AUTHOR Barbara Crooker's poems have appeared in magazines such as The Green Mountains Review, The Hollins Critic, Tar River Poetry Review, Smartish Pace, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Nimrod, The Denver Quarterly, The Tampa Review, Poetry International, The Christian Century, and America; and anthologies such as Good Poems for Hard Times (Viking Penguin),Boomer Girls (University of Iowa Press), and Commonwealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania Penn State University Press). Barbara Crooker is the recipient of the 2007 Pen and Brush Poetry Prize, the 2006 Ekphrastic Poetry Award from Rosebud, the 2004 WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the 2004 Pennsylvania Center for the Book Poetry in Public Places Poster Competition, the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, the 2003 "April Is the Cruelest Month" Award from Poets & Writers, the 2000 New Millenium Writing's Y2K competition, the 1997 Karamu Poetry Award, and others, including three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, fifteen residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, a residency at the Moulin à Nef, Auvillar, France; and a residency at The Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. A thirty-two time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, she was nominated for the 1997 Grammy Awards for her part in the audio version of the popular anthology, Grow Old Along With Me‐The Best is Yet to Be (Papier Mache Press). She is the author of ten chapbooks, two of which won prizes in national competitions: Ordinary Life won the ByLine Chapbook competition in 2001 and Impressionism won the Grayson Books Chapbook competition in 2004. Radiance, her first book, won the 2005 Word Press First Book competition and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize. Line Dance came out in 2008 from Word Press and won the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. More was published by C&R Press in 2010 and Gold was published in 2013 by Cascade Books, a division of Wipf and Stock, in their Poeima Poetry Series). Her poetry has been read on the BBC, the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company), and by Garrison Keillor on The Writer's Almanac. FROM THE BOOK: Weather Systems by Barbara Crooker Sugar maples, little fires in the trees, every blazing gradation of orange to red, and this makes me think of you, the way you press the long length of your body against me, the heat seeping through flannel, my own private furnace. If my hands and feet had a color, it would be blue. From November until May, I cannot get warm. Even my bones have cores of ice. But you are a house on fire, an internal combustion system, Sriracha sauce/jalapeño poppers/Thai curry. I stay up late, read until you're asleep, so I can slip my icy feet, frozen toes under the smoldering log of your torso. Even in the dark, you radiate. I am a cold front, a polar low coming down from the arctic. And you, why you, you're the sun.
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