Diane Wakoski

Diane Wakoski, who was born in Southern California and educated at UC, Berkeley, lived and began her poetry career in New York City from 1960-1973. She has earned her living as a book store clerk, a junior high school teacher in Manhattan, a library story-teller, a Visiting Writer and, for ten years on-the-road, by giving poetry readings on college campuses. Since 1975, she has been Poet in Residence at Michigan State University, where she continues to teach as a University Distinguished Professor. Her work has been published in more than twenty collections and many slim volumes of poetry since her first book, Coins & Coffins, was published by Hawk's Well Press in 1962. Her selected poems, Emerald Ice, won the William Carlos Williams Prize from the Poetry Society of America in 1989. Her collection Diamond Dog was published by Anhinga Press in 2010. Bay of Angels, also from Anhinga Press, was released in October 2013. Lady of Light was released in 2018.

LADY OF LIGHT BY DIANE WAKOSKI
$22.00

My name, Diane, declares
Moon Goddess, it too an oxymoron
as I control nothing,
not tides, or madness, not lovers,
or night blooming flowers. My name,
like so many names,
extravagantly, ironically, belies my organic or
celestial natures.

— from “Sea Thrift & Gorse”

LADY OF LIGHT BY DIANE WAKOSKI $22.00

April 1

found on our driveway
like a feather dropped
by a crow
8 of spades,
a playing
card/
we played Crazy Eights, slapping
cards or holding them
as if they were birds that might fly
out of our hands
decades ago, in our childhood
like the translucent, whirling,
image I imagine, prismatic and phosphorescent —
a murmuration of starlings swooping
and iridescent
But it dissolved onto a grey wall, undecorated
/ glimpses of us wearing our
velvet Sunday best dresses, yours
usually crimson, mine blue
— from “And Now She Has Disappeared in Water”

BAY OF ANGELS
BY DIANE WAKOSKI
$20.00. (email us for availability)

[The 1963 film starrng Jeanne Moreau] La Baie des Anges is in beautiful black and white that won't make you regret the lack of color. It is an existentialist film, but one that doesn't seem dated. The romance is not gaudy, it's believable -- both about gambling and about love. Since gambling and love are two reasons for excitement, two activities that teach us about ourselves, and two misunderstood human diversions, it seems that this film offers so much. The Bay of Angels, of course, is a place, but to me it's where I'd like to drown, with angels all around me, holding cards and offering me poker chips, should I ever have to die that way. -- Diane Wakoski (from the Introduction toBay of Angels)

This wonderful book is about so much. Beauty, youth, aging, love, art, passion, loss, and style are only a part of what makes the whole, and the poems are intimate, as though you might be sitting at the table with her eating a triple crème cheese and sipping a perfect wine as she sates all of your senses. -- review by Maryfrances Wagner, at We Wanted to Be Writers

YELLOW JACKETS
BY PATTI WHITE
$14.00.   (email us for availability)

Patti White's new book, Yellow Jackets, is wildly ventriloquistic. Where else would you find sumo wrestlers, Izzy the cat, King Louis the Child, Jimmy Hoffa, the residents of Thicketty, South Carolina, couples at their burnt-out ends, and yellow jackets in one collection? All empathetically expressed, and without a single repeat. If you're bored with books about what the poet ate for breakfast, this one, with its refreshing lack of ego and its generously associated images is surely worth a look. -- Lola Haskins

Praise for Tackle Box, also by Patti White: Patti White's voice is authoritative, witty, and persuasive. She can take the most trivial subject and give it substance through her imaginative vision... To read these poems is to be invigorated, to feel the possibility of moving outside the confines of one's own narrow personal life. But dynamic vision is not all White offers. Her language is radiant, intensely lyrical at times, in spite of its driving narrative force. Perhaps that is why they seem to be the poems of some Wonder Woman or High Priestess, or the kind of woman we would all be honored to know. -- Diane Wakoski (Judge, 2001 Anhinga Prize for Poetry)

SPENDING AUTUMN MORNINGS WITH DANIEL BARENBOIM
BY DIANE WAKOSKI
$10.00. (email us for availability)

This chapbook reissues the stunning final section of “Lady of Light.” Lush with sensory detail and memory, The poet listens to DVDs of performances by the renowned classical pianist, Daniel Barenboim, every morning for the autumn season as she prepares for her day. Wakoski trained seriously as a pianist in her early years and the poems respond to his performance with acute observations intertwined with musing about the day to come.

Praise for Tackle Box, also by Patti White: Patti White's voice is authoritative, witty, and persuasive. She can take the most trivial subject and give it substance through her imaginative vision... To read these poems is to be invigorated, to feel the possibility of moving outside the confines of one's own narrow personal life. But dynamic vision is not all White offers. Her language is radiant, intensely lyrical at times, in spite of its driving narrative force. Perhaps that is why they seem to be the poems of some Wonder Woman or High Priestess, or the kind of woman we would all be honored to know. -- Diane Wakoski (Judge, 2001 Anhinga Prize for Poetry)