For Lack of Diamond Years

by Caroline Beasley-Baker

Overview

FOR LACK of DIAMOND YEARS is an idiosyncratic collection of short poems - most under 20 lines - where questions lead the way.

The poems are a mixed set of free verse, unabashed counting forms like the Hay(na)ku and the Elfchen, and a very minimalist version of John Cage's mesostic form, along with a small number of poems based on colors, and a few that steal freely from traditional American songs. Rather than order the poems by kind, they mingle according to an intuitive sense of what's next, what's gone before, so that in a loose, impressionistic way there is a story of sorts being told.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940149065875
Publisher:	Pelekinesis
Publication date:	11/11/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	92
File size:	881 KB

About the Author

CAROLINE BEASLEY-BAKER is a poet and visual artist who learned to recite her first poem, a traditional Scottish song, when she was 18-months old sitting on a barstool next to a gorgeous gloved and hatted woman in a family bar in downtown Kansas City, MO . . . "I am a poor little orphan, my mommy is dead, my daddy's a drunkard . . ."

Her poems have recently appeared online and in print in Qarrtsiluni, MungBeing Magazine, MOBIUS /The Poetry Magazine, The MOM Egg, La Fovea and volumes 5, 6, 7 of the Brevitas Festival Review of the Short Poem. Meritage Press published two chain poems done with writer/poet Holly Anderson and singer/songwriter Lisa B. Burns in The Chained Hay(na)Ku Project anthology, 2010.

She frequently uses words/poems in her visual work for which she has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in painting and a National Endowment for the Arts in Collaborative Work.

Editorial Reviews

Caroline Beasley-Baker is her voice, working the faults and facets like a jeweler, but with language. She makes parallels collide, no easy trick that.

Poet - Bob Holman

These poems are extraordinary. Caroline Beasley-Baker's voice is unique, and strong, and like no other poet I know. She is the real deal, as they say—everything works, even the ravishingly brilliant ways that the poems appear on the page. For some reason, I keep thinking of Leonard Cohen's lines, 'There a crack in everything/That's how the light gets in'.

Poet - Richard Bruno

FOR LACK of DIAMOND YEARS is pitch perfect, deeply felt yet not sentimental, an absolutely true-blue and richly unadorned dance with the language. Then there's the deft delineation of airy space within the poems—much like small songbirds hopping to flight after feeding. There isn't a dash here to be altered. A deep pleasure on the page.

Poet - Holly Anderson