What is motherhood after decades of an overflow of activities, after children become adults? For Katherine Chantal, what’s next has been a personal journey of self-nurturing, of following a thread, the cords of birth, a lineage. It’s been navigating soulful aging without a map, but with curiosity and discovery. In her latest book, Streaming from […]
“My own soul was moved and deepened as I read this poetry memoir by Colleen Redman. I love the way she speaks of letting the soul have the right of way as she faces the latter part of her lifetime. Having looked back and honored the grief from her losses of family members she now […]
“It takes time in the dark room to bring lived-experience into focus and to develop the meaning we’ve made of our lives.” Poems from the Dark Room, Colleen Redman’s third book of poems in a series, has been published and can now be ordered ($13) from Amazon and is available locally at The Harvest Moon […]
-The following first appeared in The Floyd Press on December 30, 2021. Objects are Closer Than They Appear is a new book of poetry by Floyd poet Colleen Redman. The 43-poem collection is a sequel, or a deepening, to Redman’s 2017 Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife, published by Finishing Line Press. As a poetic […]
I think of every part of life as a developmental stage. We learn to walk and talk. We develop attachments and a conscience. We are attracted to others, try new things, do work that we love and hope to be recognized. It all goes according to some unspoken schedule and with every stage we can […]
-The following 2017 review was done by excerpting the first line or few in one post from each month last year. You can click on the name of the month for a full accounting. January – This morning the moon glowed like a spotlight in a theater of sky. It appeared like a trick that […]
-This review of my poetry collection, along with a small selection of my poems from the book, is in the current issue of Floyd County Moonshine, which features one of my photographs on the cover. Colleen Redman’s new chapbook from Finishing Line Press, Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife, is an intriguing collection. The […]
We put on a good show. Maybe we should take it on the road, or at least do a couple of more local readings. Chelsea Adams and I were featured poets on Sunday at the New River Community College in Dublin, a presentation of the NRCC Library. In was a coffee house setting. After our […]
No, this is not a picture of Jack Daniels but it is of Jack and Daniel. Jack is the co-founder of The Little River Poetry Festival and Daniel (on the 4-wheeler) is the owner of Floyd’s On the Water Kayaking and Canoeing where the festival took place over the weekend. Look for a story about the […]
Each mark is a dream / that tells more than one truth / and believes in the existence / of the next page… Packing a Suitcase for […]
There’s a lot of traveling in Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife, my poetry collection being published by Finishing Line Press, whether it’s back-and-forth between the past and the present, between growing up on the coast of Massachusetts and writing poetry in my kitchen in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, or between the rich […]
That’s a picture of me packing a suitcase for the afterlife, sorting a few years of poetry into a collection, one that reads like a memoir, explores the weight of loss, rummages through my childhood closet and is informed by dreams. I’m picking and choosing what fits and distilling the rest to its essence. Poet […]
