Life Afterlife / A Book of the Hours
from 3: A Taos Press.
Cover art by Aletha St. Romain
Book design and typesetting by Leslie Cox, FEEL Design Associates, Taos, NM
Life Afterlife / A Book of the Hours gathers a lover’s poems from a life together in body and from love translated to grief as the sudden death of her spouse transmutes a woman into the afterlife of a widow. As her husband becomes her spirit mate, she asks him, What are you now?, struggling with Orphean desire. And so, the poems speak intimately to the beloved, turn inward to the self to face the chaos and conflicting emotions of trauma, and journey outward, as the heart broken open witnesses the suffering of others. A book of hours, brief lyric observations of her garden or dream experiences, weaves through the poems. These delicate lines hold the speaker in the present, even as the poems move in other dimensions of time—memory, imagination, and myth.
Water Signs (Finishing Line Press, 2009), no. 67 in the New Women’s Voices Series, includes three interlocking sonnet crowns, each situated in the season of a zodiacal water sign: Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces.
Water Signs, New Women’s Voices series, Finishing Line Press, 2009.
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Water Signs is a lovely hive of poems, each bound (made free) by form and the pleasures of chain-making. This is a poet whose familiarity with the blooms and deaths of the earthly world are at once intimate, faithful, painful, and finally, celebratory.
– Kathleen Peirce
Kathleen Peirce is author Mercy, winner of the Associated Writing Programs Prize; The Ardors; Divided Touch, Divided Color; and The Oval Hour, which won the Iowa Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She teaches at Texas State University.
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There lives the dearest structure deep down things–to paraphrase Hopkins. But it’s an underlying truth. We depend on those people who can show us the interconnectedness between objects that are holy and common, between moments that are mundane and mystical. In this exquisite series of interlocking sonnets Katherine Oldmixon acquaints us with a particular grandeur, yes, a freshness, that lies deep down. She is one of those poets that brings clarity to the notion that all things belong together, all secrets, winds, and psalms are part of one whole and rapturous universe.
-Alan Birkelbach, Texas Poet Laureate 2005
Alan Birkelbach’s volumes of poetry include No Boundaries, Grand Prize Winner of the Pat Stodghill Book Publication Award, and Weighed in the Balances, Grand Prize Winner of the Steves Poetry Manuscript Competition.
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Katherine Durham Oldmixon has written a gorgeous sonnet sequence, a family history and (even more) a chronicle of the natural world. There is struggle in these sonnets, but also, more strongly, “the blue joy that adumbrates life.” Oldmixon returns dusty poetic symbols to their natural wellsprings, giving seasons and their weather back to the world, refreshed.
-Susan M. Schultz
Susan M. Schultz is a poet, critic, and publisher who lives in Kane`ohe, Hawai`i on the island of O`ahu. She is author of Aleatory Allegories (Salt, 2000), Memory Cards and Adoption Papers (Potes & Poets, 2001), And Then Something Happened (Salt, 2004), and Dementia Blog (Singing Horse, 2008). She edited The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry (Alabama, 1995), and wrote A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (Alabama, 2005). She edits Tinfish Press and teaches at the University of Hawai`i-Manoa.
“Amor Encendido”
Available on youtube.com
“Amor Encendido” is a song in Spanish of love and longing.
“Amor Encendido,” performed by Tish HinojosaMusic by Robert SkilesLyrics by Katherine Durham Oldmixon Garza
Arranged and produced by Isaac Peña , sung by Tish Hinojosa, Tony Rogers on cello, Laura Mordecai on percussion, Dylan Jones on bass, Robert Skiles on piano, Video Editor, Orlando Lopez
(Hummingbird Photograph by Katherine Durham Oldmixon Garza)
Katherine Durham Oldmixon Garza 