Poet Mary A. Larkin captures the intertwining of sensuality and spirituality in her collection Window Open to the Snow. Her poems wed narrative to lyric, balance technique with emotion, and are always alive and surprising, expressed with honesty, fearlessness, and humility. Above them all hovers a visionary fifth dimension showing a wisdom and imagination of the highest order.
About the Author :
Mary Ann Larkin is the author of That Deep and Steady Hum, a collection of poems published in 2010 (The Broadkill River Press). She has also authored six chapbooks of poetry: The Coil of the Skin, (Washington Writers' Publishing House); White Clapboard, with art by A. Brockie Stevenson, (Carol Allen); The DNA of the Heart, (privately printed); A Shimmering That Goes with Us, (Finishing Line Press); gods & flesh, (Plan B Press); and On Gannon Street, (Broadkill River Press.) Her poetry has won awards and appeared in numerous magazines such as The Greensboro Review, Poet Lore, Poetry Ireland Review, New Letters, and Poetry Greece, and in a score of local and national anthologies, including America in Poetry and Ireland in Poetry, the art and poetry series published by Harry N. Abrams. In Cleveland, Ohio, she co-founded the Big Mama Poetry Troupe, five feminist poets who gave more than fifty performances from Chicago to New York. She has been awarded writer's residencies at both the Jentel Foundation in Wyoming and Yaddo in upstate New York. Her poems have appeared twice on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. Mary Ann has earned her living as a writer for organizations and publications such as Foundation News, NPR, and NIH, and also as a teacher, most recently at Howard University. She co-founded Pond Road Press, which published Tough Heaven: Poems of Pittsburgh by Jack Gilbert. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she lives in North Truro, Massachusetts.
Review :
"The past has gone nowhere at all in Mary Ann Larkin's new book, Window Open to the Snow. Memories are strong with felt life, along with other stories that become poems from the weight of the heart and skilled craft. This is a book I'll reread as it satisfies everything I love in poetry: situation, plot, language, humanity." -Grace Cavalieri, Maryland's tenth Poet Laureate
"The poems in Mary Ann Larkin's new collection, Window Open to the Snow, are open, emotionally true, and, above all brave-joyous in their unabashed sensuality and uncompromising in their allegiances. These are poems that never wander off into abstraction, but hold close to the beauty and complexity of the world. 'I need a metaphor . . . ' she writes, for what's unsayable, and she finds these, again and again, in the risen details of memory and the felt music of lived experience." -Jean Nordhaus, author of Innocence
"So many fresh, convincing poems in this collection. In one, Mary Ann Larkin addresses the classical Chinese masters she's drawn to, wanting to know all about them as people. But then, beyond that, she asks to hear them say where they live, the song of their place names. Larkin gets to the essence, the song, of our experiences-maternal, sexual, romantic, political. This is that rare collection that affords recognition and pleasure on page after page." -Alan Feldman, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award for Immortality
