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lyrical, irreverent, earthy - poems for your heart and mind
***** Review by Whitney Scott
Readers may indeed take flight via Maureen Connolly’s aptly titled volume of thirty poems starting with excursions in “Reveries,” a sentimental journey recalling the sweet past: salami sandwiches, her mother’s almond-scented lotion, and ‘the warmth of the sun after loneliness’; and moving on to Chicago’s well-known hospital and L trains.
“Cook County Hospital,” recounts from the poet/physician’s eyes the Hellish birthing where ‘all labor together/in a fifty-foot-square room….Their groans/…a call and response’ – yet babies are birthed ‘trailing stardust.’ Little quirky humanity remains on the Green Line, once called the more descriptive Lake Street L, where real drivers called out the stops – her nod to nostalgia in “Riding the L” -- two wildly contrasting rides.
Along the way, we make our way down the Illinois River toward the Mississippi, passing factory towns and silhouetted smokestacks; hop on a Harley, riding where ‘skinny white clouds/stretch across gray skies’; and gaze at an artist’s mural commemorating Nature’s ‘fish, planets, a star birthing a star’ in this collection celebrating stubborn survival and rebirth.
Whether boarding the L train of nostalgia or lying ‘naked on the curve of the earth,’ this Winged trip is well worth it
***** Review by Whitney Scott
Readers may indeed take flight via Maureen Connolly’s aptly titled volume of thirty poems starting with excursions in “Reveries,” a sentimental journey recalling the sweet past: salami sandwiches, her mother’s almond-scented lotion, and ‘the warmth of the sun after loneliness’; and moving on to Chicago’s well-known hospital and L trains.
“Cook County Hospital,” recounts from the poet/physician’s eyes the Hellish birthing where ‘all labor together/in a fifty-foot-square room….Their groans/…a call and response’ – yet babies are birthed ‘trailing stardust.’ Little quirky humanity remains on the Green Line, once called the more descriptive Lake Street L, where real drivers called out the stops – her nod to nostalgia in “Riding the L” -- two wildly contrasting rides.
Along the way, we make our way down the Illinois River toward the Mississippi, passing factory towns and silhouetted smokestacks; hop on a Harley, riding where ‘skinny white clouds/stretch across gray skies’; and gaze at an artist’s mural commemorating Nature’s ‘fish, planets, a star birthing a star’ in this collection celebrating stubborn survival and rebirth.
Whether boarding the L train of nostalgia or lying ‘naked on the curve of the earth,’ this Winged trip is well worth it
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Maureen Connolly
Oak Park, IL
Maureen Connolly is a dual national of Ireland and the United States. Her poetry and fiction are published in after hours, Ariel, Ten Thousand Tons of Black Ink, and the anthologies Earth Beneath, Sky Beyond and The Country Doctor Revisited, among others. Readings include Printers Row, Guild Complex, Roots Salon and Around the Coyote Arts Festival. She received an award from the Illinois Arts Council and a fiction fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation.