Poetry

With Caught Before Flight, Vicki Whicker fashions a lyric memoir that takes us on a trip from a stark 60’s childhood to her technicolor adulthood. These poems spring from a strong feminine gaze: edgy, sensual, lyrical and vivid. Poet Jack Grapes writes, “Read these poems as you would inhale oxygen, both before and after you’ve lost your breath reading these feathery poems, each one as profound as a mountain.” Memoirist Josh Kilmer-Purcell writes, “Caught Before Flight is overflowing with exquisitely succulent imagery of Whicker’s personal relationships…creating residual longing that lingers beyond the final page…Rich, mature, and impressively lyrical, these poems demand to be savored.” Whicker left the West Coast and her fashion career to experience and interpret, as poet and fine art photographer, the bucolic life of upstate New York.

Julene Waffle’s So I Will Remember captures the beauty and turbulence of the past and present to vividly populate a future when memory fades. In her tribute to family, Waffle shows we are who we are because of the choices our ancestors made and the world that shaped them. Poet Liz Rosenberg said the book “is filled with small, shining gems—glimpses of her young son; an ode to the world of wind and stars. In fact her book is full of nature—the nature around us, and insight into the human nature within us.” Poet Julie Suarez said that Waffle “helps us to remember our own panoply of losses and delights…She makes the everyday luminous and catches ‘moments of awe and beauty in a web of words’—no small task.”  Waffle teaches and coaches at Morris Central School and operates Colonial Ridge Golf Course in Laurens with her family.