Most things have no reason. Why you leave a lover or join another, why you choose to stay where you live; these questions you may have no answer for. Or the answers change. Cloudy with a Fire in the Basement explores living from an awareness that has no reference points, that carries the risk of making no sense, of losing others who may require it, of understanding that there’s no safety. The poems go toward these notions, even if the writer is fleeing. Within Bloom's new poems exists an attempt toward freedom that demands looking at whatever the psyche revolts against or craves. By hawking an eye on human experience that has previously been rejected or desired—cruelty, love, grief, a good fitting pair of jeans, God — the poems investigate stuck places and too-tight habits. They skitter and rest, and lie down in the chaos and the quiet, in the overwhelming, tragic, sequinned world; and occasionally they alight in reality. Reviews: “Bloom’s synthesis of contradictory passions into graceful poetics connects Permiso to writing by Adrienne Rich (Dark Fields of the Republic), Anne Carson (The Beauty of the Husband), Esta Spalding (The Wife’s Account). Thinkers, feelers, in conversation with the music of language, building on the gift of accepting almost any sound — in this case any subject matter — as permissible textures for honest poems.”
—Meg Walker, The Globe & Mail About the Author: Ronna Bloom is a self-employed poet who works in hospitals and universities. She leads workshops there, prescribes poems, and writes them on the spot. Permiso (Pedlar Press, 2009) was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award. Her poems have been translated into Spanish and Bengali and broadcast on CBC Radio. Her She is currently Poet in Community at University of Toronto, and Poet in Residence at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. An active psychotherapist, Bloom lives in Toronto.
www.ronnabloom.com |
