Ann Medlock - Works - Arias

"The way I identify a really good poem is that it invades me like Attila the Hun. I become excited, agitated, and my mind starts to race. I feel disoriented, like a pygmy stepping out from under his forest canopy onto a savanna for the first time. Many of the poems I've read so far in Arias have done this to me, and reading three or four in a row that have this effect pretty much wrecks my day. I can't believe none of these poems has seen print before this book. Blows me away."
--John Bennett, Editor, Vagabond Press

"Beware! These poems stay with you for days-- they affect the way you see your world and your place in it. Ann Medlock is a life force; it's rare to know one. Here's your chance."
--Goody Cable, creator of the readers' paradise,
Oregon's Sylvia Beach Hotel.

"Ann Medlock's poems achieve an almost impossible perfection: they are impassioned and witty, profound and serenely beautiful, elegant and colloquial. Quite simply, they represent language at its finest."
                             -- Andrew Carroll, editor of 101 Great American Poems
                                and Songs for the Open Road: Poems of Travel & Adventure,
                                executive director of the American Poetry & Literacy Project

"When a wise woman turns to poetry, witches become light, hills are lion women, a grandfather may be dangerous, and God's attention gets called to beauty. Join Ann Medlock in turning poetry into real life, and real life into poetry."
--Gloria Steinem

Dear Ann Medlock,
It's a great honor to have a book of poems dedicated to me--and such a fine book! "Words Written for Voices" is absolutely right; the poems are narrative and wonderfully descriptive. They need to be heard. I have only been able to read a few of them, because I have lost my central vision and can't read at all except with a big magnifying machine and that is a cumbersome and tiring task. So I will wait for my reader/friend to come (also a poet) and read your book to me. Among the few poems I was able to read was "Michelangelo's Hand," a beautiful story.
Heartfelt thanks for the book and the dedication, and all the best to you.
--Lisel Mueller

After getting over the shock of receiving this, I sent Mueller an audiotape of six actors reading from the book at the publication party. She liked it. You can read two works by this Pulitzer prize winner here on the site and in her book, Alive Together.

In the breadth of its range and the skillful modulation of its many voices, Medlock's Arias, Riffs and Whispers is truly "a little world made cunningly/ of Elements" . . The elements are the old ones, earth (locales all the way from Queens to Dunkirk to Afghanistian to Mandela's South Africa), air ("Flying Blind" for instance: "we do not sink from the sky"), fire (love, bullets) and water ("Evergreen Code of the West" gives the rainy forests of the Pacific Northwest back to the trees at last). You don't have to love Poetry with a capital 'P" to love and learn from this book, but you do have to admire fine craftsmanship and a sweeping world view.
                            --Clarinda Harriss, Chair, English Department,
                              Towson University;
                              author of The Bone Tree, The Night Parrot and
                              Licence Renewal for the Blind;
                              would-be blues singer

This work is time-release poetry. Read it, and the meds go where needed, comme ces prophètes de temps jadis.
--Hank Murrow, master potter

I was privileged to attend the debut performance of Ann Medlock's Arias, Riffs and Whispers. Aloud or in silence, the collection, like Ann herself, communicates an elegant mix of taste and truth, qualities of character that nourish and sustain over time. No hint, here, of cowardice, the "chicken" Ann claims to be. Rather, I hear in her poems the seasoned commentary of commitment-as in "Destination Final": "at last and forever, this is home."
--Pushkara Sally Ashford

Much of what has come echoing back about the book has been in the form of hands on hearts, tears, laughs, "way-to-go"s--hard to quote here. If you have the book and have a comment, make Contact! I'd love to put your words here. Unless of course you hated what you read. Then I'd take a pass.