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When one thinks of
concentration camps, one thinks of death; but Gail Peck’s poems in From Terezin, based on artwork by children in Terezin Concentration Camp,
brim with vitality. These poems are voices, the voices of children who,
in the midst of suffering, chose to draw flowers and fish, leaves and
the moon, each other. They drew their pictures as Gail Peck draws them
with the strokes of language: alive, their imaginations thriving.
Rhett
Iseman Trull
From Terezin
Pudding House Publications /ISBN 1-58998-640-7
$11.50 including S&H
To order: Gail Peck
250 King Owen Ct.
Charlotte, NC 28211
www.gailpeck.org
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At the center of this
beautifully crafted book is, indeed, an unquenchable thirst. This is a
world of longing, always for something just out of reach, a world filled
with the ever-present fear of what might flourish/ among the tree
roots/ veiled in beauty and vengeance. Yet at the root of
all the longing, the thirst, is a deep and abiding love for the people
and things and places of this often difficult world. I don’t know any
other poet more skillful than Gail Peck at divining music from everyday
speech. Each poem takes up to a place we never expected to go, a place
that feels just right once we arrive there.
Cathy Smith Bowers
In, Thirst, Gail Peck
lays out the fever chart of a family, four generations of Sad
things ghosting their way back. With plain spoken tenderness and
anguish, Peck brings us their stories, opening the valve of grief until
it flows freely. Thirst is also about the complexities of love.
Love and loss: these are the twin poles that magnetize the poems and
draw us into them, where we’re held by a voice that is at once
affectionate and exasperated and ruefully true.
Elton Glaser
Thirst is
available from the author: Gail Peck 250 King Owen Ct. Charlotte, NC
28211 $15 including postage
Thirst
is available from:
www.MainStreetRag.com/store/ ISBN
1-930907-45-1
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Foreshadow
is available from the MSR Online Bookstore
www.MainStreetRag.com/store/
ISBN 1-930907-14-1 $6
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Reading stacks of
manuscripts entered in contests, I have occasionally daydreamed of one
whose last page might send me eagerly back to its first for a second
reading. This was the one. Drop Zone weaves the textual
richness and energetic density of poetry into a far-flung and
spellbinding net of narrative. I have come to care deeply about the
people of these poems, thanks to the poet’s extraordinary blend of
humanity and technical skill.
Henry Taylor, Series
Final Judge
Drop Zone
may be ordered through Barnes & Noble, Borders, or Amazon.com. It can
also be ordered directly from the publisher: Texas Review Press,
English Department, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX
77341.
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Gail Peck’s poems are distinguished by their
clarity and precise attention to detail and to language. Her speaker
examines the past—both distant and near—with an unflinching
determination to explore the hurts and losses of a life, and to extract
understanding. Her discoveries rise out of each poem’s experience with a
remarkable lack of inflation, and a convincing sense of hard-earned
knowledge. The speaker tells us in the collection’s last poem, "Music":
"though I can’t play/ and know nothing of music, except the pressure/ of
one thing against another,/ how hollowness makes sound"; out of
pressure, out of "hollowness," come authentic poems.
Joan Aleshire
New River is
available from the author: Gail Peck 250 King Owen Ct. Charlotte, NC
28211 $6 including postage
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