Riding Free in a Blue Studebaker
poems by
Janell MoonISBN 13: 978-1-59948-101-2
~80 pages, $14***This title was selected for publication after finishing as a finalist in the 2007 MSR Poetry Book Award contest. ***
About the Author / Comments / Sample
Janell Moon won the National Salt Hill Prize, the Whiskey Hill Award, and the National Stonewall Prize awarded by Chestnut Hills Press. She has also won awards in the Georgia State University Randall Jared Award, he Billie Murray Denny Poetry Award, The Red Rock Review Prize , The Villa Montalvo Poetry Prize, the Gertrude Award, Comstock Poetry Award, and the Poet Lore Award among others. She is a reader for the Bay Area Poets for Peace Project and has been published in many literary journals including Americas, Runes, Calyz, and the Michigan Review.
She is the author of Stirring the Waters: Writing to Find Your Spirit (Tuttle) nominated for the NAPRA Nautilus Award as one of the five best spirituality books of 2002, and The Wise Earth Speaks to Your Spirit (RedWheel/Weiser) which was voted one of the best spiritual books of 2004 by Spirituality and Health Magazine. She is also the also the author of The Prayer Box (RedWheel/Weiser), and How to Pray Without Being Religious (Thorsons Element UK), a division of HarperCollins.
She is a graduate of Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, and is a San Francisco bay area counselor and hypnotherapist in private practice and a writing teacher at bay area community colleges.
The author gratefully accepts poetry comments at janellmoon@aol.com.
Janell Moon's collection of poetry travel across a broad landscape on fluid language and surprising combinations. From the how a mother provokes to the sweet memory of a forbidden nude nighttime swim, to the fantasy of wedding gone homoerotically awry, each poem is a piquant story seen through the window as the world flashes by. Moon's skill is evoking such a wide array of feelings-anxiety, desire, nostalgia, bemusement-it is our own lives flashing before us.
Jewelle Gomez, author of The Gilda Stories
Janell Moon's poems are crammed with a lifetime of everyday yeaning, secret little female intimacies and personal history that positively rumbles with quiet power. This poetry is alive and electric.
Michelle Tea, author of Rose of No Man's Land
In these poems celebrating Janell Moon's brimming life, we meet many ordinary, unique, loved people: her grandma who makes corsets for movie starts (Judy Garland, Loretta Young), her sister, dressed as her "favorite striped shorts" on the laundry line, Janell herself as a young girl who "held her silence," Janell as a wife whose "passion was covered with the heel of America's secrets." Because they detail the necessity of that secrecy, these poems are political as well as personal. They are lyrical and sweet-and honest. Through they chronicle her life, they succeed as poems, intense and spare, rich in their psychological understanding, not burdened with plodding analysis. I like a lot her found poem from a KQED broadcast, Janell Moon grabs poetry wherever she finds it.
Phyllis Koestenbaum, author of Doris Day and Kitschy Melodies
Howling
If there were a howling
would it be you, mother
I hear you throughout the night
I creep out of the lace curtains
through the closed windows
wander the verandah that curls the house
take trays of salmon, my smoked heartthe cat won't let me touch her
hisses and moves away, stretches her fine back
chases the ringlets of sun on the flowered floor
carpets you laid down
I could have died for you
those years of ducking
the slap of your emeralded handI stayed in, wanting out
checking exits, opening the shutters
cut holes in the side of the house
but when I heard the click, click, clicking
of your high heels coming home
I helped you out of buttons and zippers
tiny golden latches, silver snaps
cold-creamed your facehow I raged at you,
the first woman I ever loved
couldn't be there, couldn't leave you
me, under the bed searching for bread
flinging my body at your locked door.
Small Town Summer
It wasn't the heat
that made us take off
late one night after sitting
out on the screened porch,
my friends and I cooling
ourselves by dropping
ice cubes down the front of
our dresses. Too much has
been made of heat and its ability
to force a person. It was
that time kept unwinding with no place
to go but to the next day, the movie house
changing once a month, the teen center
not opened yet, drag racing down
Main Street stopped by the mothers' group.
I got some money and the five of us
took off in the blue Studebaker
looking for life beyond
the ticking of fireflies and sweat.
We drove from Pittsburgh to Youngstown,
slept the night hot in the parking
lot of the Holiday Inn. The next morning
a helicopter spotted my father's car
when we were still sleeping and escorted
us home. Betsy's father was the angriest; she'd told him
she'd be right back with chocolate ice cream.
Together
My hair turns gray
but grows curlier, thicker.
Her hair thins and yellows.
It's something we don't discuss.
We sit on the bench in the sun.Time spreads our hips.
We spread our feet a bit for ease.
We wear comfortable shoes
and double socks for warmth.We were friends when our children
broke their ankles turning somersaults
on yellow flowered hillsides.We were together when as adult children
they came home disappointed
and no one loved them like their momma did
and no one eased their way.
Life tore at them and caught them unprepared.
We helped each other help them out again
to heartache, love and revved up cars
so we could enjoy this sun.She stretches her back
and pushes out her stomach.
I remember my back and yawn and stretch with her.I sit and think of pine trees
and green grass. She dreams peppermint.
Our hormones bounce. We get hot flashes.
We let our tummies go. We don't care.
We are round like water-smoothed stones.We use babushkas to cover our heads
from the wind and sing when silver breezes come.We smile. We rock. We're together.
We're changing seasons, my friend, this sun.