Homestead Lighthouse Press’s award-winning author Michael Favala Goldman, whose Small Sovereign was selected as the “Best Book of Poetry” in 2022 by the Los Angeles Book Festival, knocked it out of the park Friday night, September 27, at the Tell It Slant Poetry Festival at the Emily Dickinson Museum (“The Homestead”). Michael, whose new book of poetry, Destinations, will be available in January 2025, read a long jazz poem that included three riffs on his clarinet.
Bravo, Michael!
Tell It Slant 2024 on Instagram
Los Angeles Book Festival Award 2022
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Kenneth Lyon’s A Dance Horizontal is also available.
Ken’s book surprises the poetry reader ⏤ old and new ⏤ in many ways. This wise elder’s first book of verse is neither polite nor conventional. The poems are genuinely inclusive, breaking all the rules (Walt Whitman smiles), containing multitudes. Lyon’s poems have purpose; they also have an edge, and that edge is sharp.
Some readers of contemporary poetry will be startled by what they’ll meet in this Lyonesque landscape where the terrain is super-stoked by gender identity, by who is cancelled and who is not, and by who should and shouldn’t be. Beware! A notice for you might already be in the media and the mail. To quote Theodore Roethke, “You may be Dirty Dinky!”
Lyon has a broad reach. His poems can be funny, even risque, yet serious subjects rise everywhere. A lifelong educator with Jewish Ukrainian roots, Lyon strips away rhetoric to assess the travesty of the current war:
there comes a time
when you must kill
when democracy
is invaded by a mad man
and every value that you have
is attacked by armed Russian soldiers
who don't understand why they are fighting
yet destroy your homeland
and devastate your people
At a time when many published poets seem unsure about what they have to say, even about who they are, Lyon’s humble self-confidence and self-awareness are restorative. So many of his poems are simply beyond versifying, beyond speech-making. They are the cold, clear expression of a point of view that will make sense to millions as long as they are thinking ably.
~ Robert McDowell
“A Dance Horizontal by Kenneth Lyon is a treasure chest of versatile, stimulating poetry. Ken’s exceptional ability to titillate, challenge, and touch the hearts of everyone who loves words is the reason I recommend A Dance Horizontal as a piece de resistance for one’s library. It’s Ken Lyon at his best, and what “a best” that is!
~ Sharon Wolfe, Desert Poets
A Dance Horizontal at Barnes & Noble, Prairie Lights, River Walk Books, Toadbooks, and Amazon
Special thanks to the many independent bookstores carrying Ken’s book!
Robert McDowell October 1, 2024