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Take the Long Way Home
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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