Barbara Crooker's poems have appeared in magazines such as The Green Mountains Review, The Hollins Critic, Tar River Poetry Review, Smartish Pace, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Nimrod, The Denver Quarterly, The Tampa Review, Poetry International, The Christian Century, and America; and anthologies such as Good Poems for Hard Times (Viking Penguin), Boomer Girls (University of Iowa Press), and Commonwealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania Penn State University Press). Barbara Crooker is the recipient of the 2007 Pen and Brush Poetry Prize, the 2006 Ekphrastic Poetry Award from Rosebud, the 2004 WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the 2004 Pennsylvania Center for the Book Poetry in Public Places Poster Competition, the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, the 2003 "April Is the Cruelest Month" Award from Poets & Writers, the 2000 New Millenium Writing's Y2K competition, the 1997 Karamu Poetry Award, and others, including three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, thirteen residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a prize from the NEA. A twenty-six time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, she was nominated for the 1997 Grammy Awards for her part in the audio version of the popular anthology, Grow Old Along With Me--The Best is Yet to Be (Papier Mache Press). She is the author of ten chapbooks, two of which won prizes in national competitions: Ordinary Life won the ByLine Chapbook competition in 2001 and Impressionism won the Grayson Books Chapbook competition in 2004. Radiance, her first book, won the 2005 Word Press First Book competition and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize. Line Dancecame out in 2008 from Word Press and won the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. More is her latest (C&R Press, 2010). Garrison Keillor has read eighteen of her poems on The Writer's Almanac, National Public Radio, and recently, she read at The Library of Congress.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dancing with Words,
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This review is from: Line Dance (Paperback)
In her new collection Barbara Crooker sees life as a dance. She gives us poems about literal dancing, the kind that takes place at weddings, reunions, and proms. But under the surface there are other kinds of dances going on. There's the back and forth movement between the past and the present. And there's the shifting of relationships between family members, friends, and lovers. Nature, too, joins in, dancing its own kind of jig. Appropriately, poems about music, especially rock 'n' roll, and poems about breathing weave their way throughout this collection. Crooker's signature gifts are here again--stunning diction, surprising metaphors, and, of course, mastery of the line. This collection is "Dancing with the Stars" for people who love words.
Here's a sample poem you can dance to: Listen, I want to tell you something. This morning is bright after all the steady rain, and every iris, peony, rose, opens its mouth, rejoicing. I want to say, wake up, open your eyes, there's a snow-covered road ahead, a field of blankness, a sheet of paper, an empty screen. Even the smallest insects are singing, vibrating their entire bodies, tiny violins of longing and desire. We were made for song. I can't tell you what prayer is, but I can take the breath of the meadow into my mouth, and I can release it for the leaves' green need. I want to tell you your life is a blue coal, a slice of orange in the mouth, cut hay in the nostrils. The cardinals' red song dances in your blood. Look, every month the moon blossoms into a peony, then shrinks to a sliver of garlic. And then it blooms again.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
beautiful and understandable poetry...,
By
This review is from: Line Dance (Paperback)
Critics describe Crooker's poetry here as "a sublime tonic against the darkness" or "spilling over with energy and movement" or "exquisite." The work in Line Dance is all that, of course. Such critical praise is justified and deserved, but leaves out two important aspects readers need to know. One, regardless of topic -- death, autism, failure, loss -- Barbara Crooker distills beauty from it. Two, her joyous words will be easily understood by readers. She welcomes readers into her world and makes them feel at home. In "Blues for Karen" Crooker reaches out to a dead friend the best way she knows how, through words and images: How could you die? We weren't done talking yet. So I am trying to call you using the morning glories, whose blue mouths are open to the sky, whose throats are white stars, thinking those tendrils could trellis upward, hand over little green hand, so tenacious, they hang on in any storm... Crooker's use of metaphors is reader-friendly. We can all relate to her descriptions with a sense of wonder. This excerpt from "Zero at the Bone" takes us to a frozen place where the wintry season joins the unwritten lines of the heart: The scouring light of winter scrubs whatever it falls on, the bright whiteness revealing all the small incursions, marks and stains of another year. In the bare bones of trees, we see old nests, broken branches, bagworm, gall, all that was hidden by summer's green scrim. Now we are at the heart of things, the bone chill of zero, the closed eye of the pond. No secrets. Buried within "The VCCA Fellows Visit the Holiness Baptist Church, Amherst, Virginia" is one of the sweetest, most touching and comforting ruminations on death I've ever read: ...a deacon speaks of his sister, who's "gone home," and I realize he doesn't mean back to Georgia, but she's passed over. I float on this sweet certainty, of a return not to the bland confection of wispy clouds and angels in nightshirts, but to childhood's kitchen, a dew-drenched June morning, roses tumbling by the back porch. These poems represent "the thin rind of memory" protecting the juicy pulp that is Barbara Crooker's life and poetic mind. Highly recommended.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Life in a Line,
By Bob F. (Bethlehem, PA USA) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Line Dance (Paperback)
Close to twenty years ago, I read a Crooker poem, "Raspberries," in the collection, The Lost Children. Until then, I had never found such erotic beauty in a fruit ... and beauty/redemption in what scars our lives, as in "Christ Comes to Centralia," from the same collection.
With Line Dance the simple beauty remains, but each seems filled with particulars, e.g., in describing the Pennsylvania mountains, Crooker reveals: "... Blue, Allegheny, Kittatinny / Tuscarora, this big-muscled, broad-backed / hunk of a state." Or in listing the winters of impressionist artists: "Caillebotte's chimneys exhale like glamorous / women in a cafe." Crooker's strong metaphorical language inhabits the lines, but the poems seem airy and natural. Each word is perfectly placed; the line endings are natural--not straining toward the jarring/illogical effect of much contemporary poetry; and the final lines are lessons for anyone who has ever wondered how to end a poem. Other reviewers have mentioned the "autism poems," and anyone who reads such poems as "45s, LPs" will understand how, as in other fields of endeavour, less is more! The "less" in this and other poems that deal with the autism of her son, breaks our hearts--less is more. And, perhaps, in this amateur review, I should end with less: Buy and Read this Book.
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