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Come Closer
by Laurie Blauner
Winner of the Library of Poetry Award for 2022 from Bitter Oleander Press.
Laurie Blauner’s book of poems are about transformation, about schism and morph, about imagining and unsettling.
...It is a book of poetry that could be read as a guide as much as a collection of puzzles.
...Many of Blauner’s
poems contain juxtapositions between the self and intimate others,
usually family. These poems often involve little dialogue and as such
play out in their descriptions like dance or painting. The poet’s work
in Come Closer alludes to a need to see difference and better
understand it—but not simply by talking about it, but through action,
through movement, through breath and life. These are not wholly
optimistic works, but they are works that bring forward answers as much
as they bring forward provocation.
--Greg Bem (read the entire review here)
The book is a successful
merger of prose-like forms and poetic creativity. The subjects
are universal and handled in a fresh way. I would read this book
of verse again.
— Lynette G. Esposito (read the entire review here)
Available now! To order directly from the publisher, go here. To order from Amazon, go here.
To hear Laurie read from the book, click here.
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Come
Closer, Laurie Blauner’s new collection of delicately wrought fables
invites the reader into a delirium where unfamiliar and familiar
realities combine. You can call these succinct yet lyrically sophisticated tales where it rains without raining, where
birds open themselves like books, and your own heart can bite you
meditations, auguries, revelations, or morality plays. Possessing an
unrivaled imagination, Laurie Blauner transports us to cities that you
recognize vaguely as if retrieved from that sinuous space between
waking and sleeping. We are told in the opening lines There’s something
wrong with the city: the streets I need for an appointment have
changed; the florist shop leaps to the top of a tall building. The
commonplace is altered to reveal its true nature; the apartment becomes
not a place of refuge but the setting for speculative transformations.
Blauner, the 21st century alchemist, takes the unpromising base metals
of our everyday and spins them into literary gold. No one has expressed
the unnatural so naturally as the poet in Come Closer, her vision is
cerebral and visceral and somewhere on a continuum between pleasure and
horror. Reptiles poured away, flowers were devastated, and the woman
grew full and empty with her own painful truths. She is our
storytelling Mary Shelley on Lake Geneva in the year of no summer.
—Stephanie Dickinson, author of Blue Swan, Black Swan: The Trakl Diaries
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In
Laurie Blauner’s new and thoroughly engaging assemblage of interwoven
prose poems, fresh patterns patiently emerge in varied and surprising
forms. A master of irony, Blauner offers the reader a frequently
appearing narrator who lives at once inside and out of her awakenings.
Here is a master of irony and personification opening a new mythology.
It can be found quickly, a beginning for “combing happiness” in the
middle of further mysteries. From a character’s momentary mustache
(will you too speak to the borrowed man?) to a gently transformed
feminine series of multiple possibilities, we are offered realities
living in suggestion. Here the language is as captivating and necessary
as its sources, and among the moments offered by containment,we find ourselves already renewed and extended.
—Rich Ives, author of Light from a Small Brown Bird
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