DESCRIPTION

Poetry. “The poems in TRAVELING THROUGH GLASS are as crisply separate from each other as grains of basmati rice. Each has its own personality, its own individuality whether it is about India or remembering a wallpaper from childhood. But no matter if about India or a childhood memory they are woven with startlingly apt metaphors and similes. A widow’s oppressive sorrow is ‘like the scent of gardenias in a closed room….” In a triumphantly elongated metaphor the Atlantic becomes a ‘native ventriloquist, throws its voice into the clenched lips of an oyster, whispering / in the tide-slurred accent of a tired Southern girl.’ Her images cause the poems to open and expand like a Chinese paper flower bursting from its clam shell in a glass of water. Vargo brings to her work an eye that can be Daliesque, as when she perceives a road as a skunk, but always she keeps her excellent and able writing hand steadily on human relationships—their pain, their inevitable alterations, their frail but most necessary buttressing against oblivion. Her wit and wisdom are apparent throughout this unusual collection.”—Karen Swenson

AUTHOR BIO

Beth Copeland lived in Japan, India, and North Carolina as a child. Her book TRAVELING THROUGH GLASS received the 1999 Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award. Her poems have been widely published in literary journals and have received awards from Atlanta Review, North American Review, the North Carolina Poetry Society, and Peregrine. Two of her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is an English instructor at Methodist University in Fayetteville, North Carolina. She lives in a log cabin in the country with her husband, Phil Rech.

Author City: FAYETTEVILLE, NC USA