Gallimaufry & Farrago

by Kathleen Balma

Overview

How did Abraham Lincoln build the log cabin he was born in? What happens at an invisible gun show? Are aliens really controlling a Chicago musician's ears? Where can you go for a meal of angel testicles? For twenty years Kathleen Balma has been crafting her answers to these and other metaphysical questions with a humor and style all her own. Known for her deadpan and lack of pretense, Balma is a master at creating poems that are easy to enter and hard to put down. Informed by a childhood spent in four Midwestern states and an adult life spent on three continents, Gallimaufry & Farrago is a musical mix of verse and prose by a worldly and imaginative thinker.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635346121
Publisher:	Finishing Line Press
Publication date:	08/24/2018
Pages:	44
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.11(d)

About the Author

Kathleen Balma is a Fulbright Fellow, teacher, librarian, and translator from every US state you never wanted to visit. Her writing awards include a Pushcart Prize and a Writer-in-Residence Fellowship from Rivendell Writers' Colony. She lives in New Orleans.

Table of Contents

For Oyster Shuckers 1

Abraham, Honestly 2

The Fountain of Relative Age 4

Somewhere a Town 5

Revelation at the Invisible Gun Show 6

Black Hole Horizon 7

The Forgiveness Project 8

Poem on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown 9

Summer Camp for Sirens 10

A Tour of Pompeii’s Red-Light District 11

Stopping Time Is not as Useful as We Thought 13

Elegy for Florence 14

What the Traveler Knows 15

Genetically Modified Crop Conspiracies 16

Dramatic Dichotologue 17

Dotage 18

From Your Hostess at the T & A Museum 19

The Causes of Cyclone Formation Aren’t Well

Understood 20

Escape from the Abhorrent Vacuum 22

Poem Poem Poem Poem Poem 23

Spaghetti Midwestern 24

What Do Ghosts Need? 25

Highlights from an Interview with the Author 27

Singularity 30

Temporary Empathy 32

Lunch Alone at Antoine’s, September 2015 33

Editorial Reviews

“A ghost needs an audience or it is pointless,” writes Balma, and the same can be said about poets. “But does a ghost need a point?” she continues. No. Does a poet? Jeez, I hope not! Poems are toys, not vitamin pills, and these are full of playfulness. They’re also full of contradictions (see “Revelation at the Invisible Gun Show”), because between the contra- and the diction is where the poem is found. I won’t tell you what “the best sad thing that’s happened to me all year” is, but it’s a doozy. Read on, reader, and let Katy Balma free your mind.

David Kirby

From shell shuckers to aliens to the ghost of Sid Vicious, Gallimaufry & Farrago is a marvelous concoction steeped in myth, nostalgia, humor, and the chimerical. Sirens are juxtaposed with Dreamsicles, John Wayne rides in on a John Deere tractor, and Brigadoon and Salvador Dali are saluted in the titular poem about stopping time. Punctuated with startling similes like oysters as “angel testicles” and Abe Lincoln as a “Christmas specter,” Balma’s book is “a complex amalgam of positive and negative” imagery, shining with both wit and wonder.

Simone Muench

The zigs and zags of Katy Balma’s mind, in addition to offering a great ride, remind me that a straight line is what I want out of a ruler, not a poem. You should stand up when reading this book, because her poems don’t ponder or pander, they run.

Bob Hicok

From the Publisher