by Martina Reisz Newberry 128 pages ~ 70 poems ISBN-10: 1947021052 ISBN-13: 978-1947021051 Price: $18.99 Publisher: Unsolicited Press To order from Amazon ABOUT THE BOOK: Take the Long Way Home addresses the various paths and pathologies that take us from where we are to where we may be going. ADVANCE PRAISE: "Women are always displaced persons/born searching for someone/someplace to be." Martina Reisz Newberry's fine new collection explores the mixed blessings of a long life, how desire lingers, even as beauty fades. Taking their cue from the seasons and popular songs, the poems sizzle as well as lament, as in the wonderful "How Summer Comes." "For days now, the smallest of joys/have simmered below my belt.'" These bittersweet poems mine new territory. These poems light the way. —Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of How I Lost My Virginity to Michael Cohen and Other Heart Stab Poems, and State of Grace: The Joshua . Take the Long Way Home, by Martina Reisz Newberry, is a book of reckoning, a book in which a life, / somewhat flyblown, begins its cold questions. The life in these poems belongs to one who dares to crack the silence and tell the truth of what it is to be female, to be hounded and violated by the world, by a husband, by time itself. Newberry uses plain, beautiful language to pry open the profound, to describe the stammer and palsy of love; to introduce us to her city, to the way LA's yellowish sky / holds a face like famine; and to give voice to our common, human fatigue that renders us no more space left in / the Room of Horrors. One poem claims, I saved nothing, but in this brave, tender book, Martina Reisz Newberry ministers to our pulled muscle of the soul and saves us, again and again. —Francesca Bell, Poetry Editor, >River Styx "Martina Newberry's poems present us with a true honesty and observance of life that is unbridled and passionate. When reading her poems, one feels that they have experienced the poem with her; she has an uncanny way of bringing the reader into her poetic creations and allowing them to experience the poems with her. This is a difficult task at best, and one she accomplishes masterfully." —Melanie Simms, poet and arts activist. Author of >Remember the Sun,Waking the Muse. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Newberry's books: Never Completely Awake (Available now from Deerbrook Editions), Take the Long Way Home (Available now from Unsolicited Press), Where it Goes (Deerbrook Editions), Running Like a Woman With Her Hair On Fire (Red Hen Press). Her work has been widely published in the U.S. and abroad. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Brian, a media creative. FROM THE BOOK: Nous Sommes Tous a la Femme Inconnue de la Seine *— A Quadrille by Martina Reisz Newberry Today caffeine was not enough nor the croissant. Her sadness was as big as an airplane hangar When it was called Confession she could feel forgiven. Now it is reconciliation and all she feels is hungry Who told her she was NOT a narcissist? Her children roundly proclaim her failed mothering As they danced around her chanting "insolvent, insolvent" she sat in the big chair imagining tulips and maybe a wren. She ran like a woman with her hair on fire thought herself love's steward which she was not. *We are all The Unknown Woman of the Seine—A Quadrille:According to an often-repeated story, the body of the young woman was pulled out of the Seine River at the Quai du Louvre in Paris around the late 1880s. A pathologist at the Paris Morgue was, accord- ing to the story, so taken by her beauty that he had made a wax plaster cast death mask of her face. (A Quadrille is a square dance performed typically by four couples and containing five figures, each of which is a complete dance in itself.)
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