Foraging for Light - Schmidt, Jan Zlotnik

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Résumé :
This poetry volume explores themes of loss and grief, the complexities of familial relationships, the struggles with coping with aging parents with dementia, the mourning that comes after their deaths, the significance of memory, and the struggle to maintain feelings of hope and resilience. The volume encompasses different forms of loss-from feminist poems that depict women's silencing and agency, to moments of grief and mourning, to questions of aging, to meditations on family photographs that explore the back stories of her parents' characters and experiences before the poet was born, and finally, to extended meditations on moments of resilience and hope. The volume ends with the idea of the need for foraging for light, for embracing moments of being, joy, and artistry. Notable in the volume is its hybridity-its range of forms from lyric poems to prose poetry, persona and ekphrastic poems, and ghazals. The stylistic variety makes for an enriching poetic reading experience.

Biographie:
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt is a SUNY Distinguished Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz where she teaches creative writing, American and Women's Literature, creative nonfiction, memoir, and Holocaust literature courses. Her work has been published in many journals including The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Broadkill Review, The Cream City Review, Home Planet News, Kansas Quarterly, Phoebe, Memoir (and), the Westchester Review, and Wind. Her work also has been nominated for the Pushcart Press Prize Series. She has had two volumes of poetry published by the Edwin Mellen Press (We Speak in Tongues, 1991; She had this memory, 2000). One chapbook, The Earth Was Still, was recently published by Finishing Line Press (2011 and another Hieroglyphs of Father-Daughter Time by Word Temple Press (2014). Most recently, she co-edited with Laurence Carr a collection of works by Hudson Valley women writers entitled A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley (Codhill Press 2013), which won the USA Best Book Award for Anthology.