Looking Forward

The blackeye peas are on the stove filling my home with their luscious aroma. The kitchen is stocked with food and gnosherie and a fine assortment of liquors await the promise of the evening.

I may be enslaved in another job in a week or so but for the moment I'm free. Also in a week or two, a new and powerful collection of poetry called "Cosmic Thrum" by Mary McAnally will be available from Partisan Press for $14.00 (including shipping). The Poet Christopher Butters says about this collection:

"The publication of Cosmic Rainbow by Partisan Press is an event for those who have followed the growth of Mary McAnally's poetry in the small press over the last thirty years. Present are poems many of us have loved like "We Will Make a River ", "Pain Teaches Us" , "The Great Beggs, Oklahoma Bank Robbery", as well as poems in solidarity with the African revolution, poems about her beloved cardinals and swallows, poems about the forgotten street people of New York .
Side by side with these are later poems occasioned by her return to Oklahoma, her spiritual awakening and later ministership in Tulsa. Unlike the Moral Majority, however – and very much like the poets Thomas Merton, Daniel Berrigan and Ernesto Cardenal – her tango with organized religion seems to have broadened rather than narrowed her world outlook, and only deepened her wrath against the philistines and money changers of our time.
Part memoir, part selected poems, Cosmic Rainbow gives witness to one extraordinary woman's search for truth, meaning and solidarity amid an American landscape ravaged by institutionalized exploitation, sexism and racism. Part conversation with the dead, part conversation with future generations, the later poems encourage us all to explore the " thin places" -- that unitary reality that McAnally's beloved Irish seers, magicians and prophets have long claimed lies within each of us -- even as we rededicate ourselves to the struggle for social justice in our time."

This book is an inspiring "must have" for those of us struggling daily against the odds for a just society and a life changing read for those new to the idea that a better world is possible.