Scattered Light Library at Issuu

We would like to invite you all to visit our Scattered Light Library at Issuu, now that we've done some spring cleaning (or weeding -- pick your own metaphor)  Seven of our titles are on the shelves there, free for download,. Peruse away -- here's a little browsing music to get you in the mood:

She clatters through the back door,
scowls at the librarian's puckered *shush*,
scrapes chair to table, grabs a book
that falls open to text ticked and bracketed
by anonymous hands. She clucks softly,
angles the spine away from policing eyes,
searches each margin as if she had struck
the marks first, worried that some point
might be missed if not underscored in yellow.

The girl sees impressions of her fingers
on the pages, hard evidence that books
are changed by the readers they change.
She slaps covers closed, slides the volume
into the shelves and walks away empty-
handed, reverent, her mind roaring open.
(C.Snell, Snakeskin)

Made of Smoke

Let it blow around you like hair.
You can always push it away or tuck it
behind your ear, the plumes hiding
parts of you, holding you apart
from the plastic, the falsehoods,
the impersonators.

You’ve escaped before: the holes
in your space are still where you left them,
part of your armature chalked
to the texture of ground-up pills.

Tears of second chances clear your vision
so start again. Gather up the familiar,
idealize it until it appears beside you.

Its distraction is only temporary.
Pay no attention that its head turns
on a neck arched
with your own longing.

This is the moment
before all the positioning begins,
the grand negotiations,
the heat that melts before it can singe.

Understand that it’s never the thing
you bargained for. All faults are fatal.
Pick the ones you can live with and glory
in your own erasure.

You are an image made from smoke.
On this canvas, you are the man.

Scattered Light Library

Scattered Light Library , our ongoing series of collaborations.

My Dripping Brain

"Janet's compelling, expressionistic paintings complement Cheryl's poems. Those paintings make the noise of the world instantly go silent...haunting, improbable, fascinating, complex images. Those poems cast to the reader quixotic observations, existential moods, amorous enigmas."

Thanks to musician and writer Tim Buck for this wonderful mention. My sister and I have come to count on his trenchant observations and penetrating opinions on music, art,and writing. Did he say anything about this? we ask one another when we post a new piece. If he did, we know we are on the right track.

Videopoem

We have a videopoem in the new Soundzine, live now. A special thanks to Sherry O'Keefe, the new editor,an accomplished poet whose work we both enjoy, for inviting us to submit.

Marie Kazalia

 The lovely & talented Marie Kazalia has this to say about us on her excellent blog today----

It’s a visual treat to visit The Snell Sisters Scattered Light blog!  Cheryl and Janet Snell are sisters with a dozen fiction, poetry, and art books between them–in solo and collaborative projects. Including a novel based on years spent in South India. Janet paints expressive portraits on commission. Love the blog design and great videos too... 

Thank you so much!

I Calculate My Faith in Second Chances

Come to Think of It: Paintings and Poems (Volume 1)Come to Think of It: Paintings and Poems (Volume 1)

Coupon

Got this in the email today. A coupon for free shipping on the hardback edition of Cheryl's other novel,Rescuing Ranu, until August 23.
There's a paperback version at Amazon, too.

By the bye, are you following Cheryl's wrap party posts? Do go, and tell Cheryl Janet sent you.

Fishing for Invitations

We're going on a blog tour! The book in the spotlight is Shiva's Arms, and if you would like to have us visit your blog, or review the book on your blog, we'd be grateful. Send an email to shana@writerslairbooks.com to make arrangements.

Shiva's Arms, the trailer

Here's a taste of Cheryl's NOVEL.

...in which the sisters do Black Friday

You know all about our BOOKS and ART, but have you seen what we've got at our ONLINE STORE? Mugs and calendars and jewelry boxes and decorative pillows and THIS holiday card made by our mother. In the words of Smokey Robinson, You better shop around !

Musings for a Rainy Day

"Head in Waves"

A Waste of Waters

Bed all morning,
stuttering rain. A car
hisses past, spraying
shoals of water
into green air.
If we stoppered some
in crystal with the light
slanting through, the world beyond
would waver, unsure whether
we had laid down together
because of the storm,
or because the world was full
of music---rolling tympani,
the reedy throats of birds.

Mnemosyne

We are pleased to be this week's featured guests at Mnemosyne Literary Journal. Read the first segment HERE. And stay tuned!

As promised: The SECOND episode. We're loving those comments!

HERE is Day 3 of the feature.

Take a look at the FOURTH PART.

Are you still with us? For Cheryl's story 'Closure, CLICK THIS.

DAY SIX has some questions for Cheryl.

A Stunned Buzz

"This is not poetry merely to beguile the imagination; it is experience by vital proxy, full of pulse and texture and radiance. Memento Mori is a tour de force. I cannot praise it enough and feel privileged to have had the chance to review such a gem. The book is well-produced and does credit to poet and painter on every level. Janet Snell's expressionist art - vaguely reminiscent of Edvard Munch but intensely unique - broods over these pieces, depicting shape and shadow from the hazy layers of the subconscious. These presences shifting through space are the masks we tow our troubled worlds behind." Those words are from Rosy Cole' sensitive review of our book MEMENTO MORI. Thanks so much, Rosy!

...in which the sisters are beside themselves

The author's copies of Prisoner's Dilemma came today. The BOX was heavy, the scissors were sticky, there was way too much tape! It went like this---

Fireworks threatened to take the top off.
Wet palms twitched under eruptions of happiness.

Judgments collected under the awning like rain,
hummed against the shell of her ear. Her skull
slammed in her head. Payroll hands weighed the options
like so much gold.

Runaway shoes piled up, laces tangled
like tongues caught in a lie. Checkmark wings
on canvas heels had been tools toward anonymity,
erasing footprints where they fell, driving zigzag dogs crazy
as they nipped at nothing.

Each day had been a map of dark topographies.
Turning into a skid would only postpone
whatever came next.

Every step along a lucky streak
uncovers a foreign place tricked out
with new lies and silences. Rising up
to meet the path of great good fortune,
she could have done more, if you want to know.

Green

Janet's "Embedded in Green" shows a floating figure inspired by Clememte's, but with layers of space.

Cheryl has something green for you, too:

tea-green rain
slants through a wet sky
and clouds huddle
above a praying mantis,
its camouflage thighs
juddering against a spear
of hunter green.

green-winged teal
paddle in circles
tantalizing the periphery,
and the pine fern lime
of the middle.

Michele McGrane

Poet Michele McGrane has lent space on her very fine BLOG for Cheryl's talking portrait, painted by Janet, and animated by JJ Webb. To learn more about Michele, CLICK THIS.
Thanks, Michele!

Women at Work

In Janet's "His Heart Blooms for Her" The left figure is connected by gray, to the half-figure on the right. She doesn't want that. She curls up and away from him.The egg-shaped white head on the bottom is another version of the twosome.
And furthermore...
for all you NaPo people working on your one-a-day, take a breather. Let's talk about Cheryl for a minute.

Prisoner's Dilemma, published!

My sister and I are pleased to announce the publication of our new poetry and art book,PRISONER'S DILEMMA. A few details about the work:

In game theory’s prisoner’s dilemma problem, two prisoners are given the choice between silence, and the betrayal of the other. The optimal choice turns out to be betrayal and therein lies the game’s paradox. In the work of the Snell sisters, the undercurrent of treachery winds its way through lyrical, narrative free verse accompanied by drawings of eccentric heads.

The book opens with depictions of three wounds—Tear, Cut, and Split—and examines reactions to physical and psychological hurt. In “Tear,” the drawing of a blind-eyed head with an endless tongue, done in charcoal, illustrates the poem’s central metaphor. The tongue extends into the brain and out of the head in spikes, making manifest the synesthesia of the moment: “the way you dragged your tongue/across the metal railing, /the snow irresistible, your brother/tugging you out of your skin,/with a devotion exquisite as pain.” The book goes on to delineate ways in which other corruptions-- by the body, time, luck-- influence our behavior. Who will rat on who? What is the final cost?

We meet characters like a disappointed former cheerleader who thinks she’s settling for a man who is “…building her a barbeque pit, trying to ignite the flame/that will stun her into loving him”; a woman whose desire to escape overtakes her at her garden of White Hellebore--“perhaps this is a metaphor for flesh.” In “Chase,” a man would “have followed her the way she wanted, /but night curves without warning, the stars/do not touch, the road stretches down to the sea.”

The drawing of an averted eye in “Absence” shows an empty socket with a line leading to the displaced eye. It scans its environment for the man who will “retrieve my muffled/answer, lips at my ear naming everything/you missed.” The mouth is drawn in pencil and smudged charcoal, erased slightly with a kneaded eraser, an effective way to portray the woman’s muffled answer to the man’s question, “Will you be alright?”

Sometimes things go from “Bad to Worse.” The drawing that accompanies the poem of that name shows a shadowed one-eyed face molded in white, stuck to the skull as if to suffocate it. In “Lover’s Lane,” a woman returns to the scene of a mistake, “a hatchback,/a string of yeses pulled from a no” to open “the door, though you’re in no mood for a ride.” And in “Good Cry” –and why shouldn’t we?—an onion comes apart in layers, “unlike your own skin, holding in its factories.”

The sequence of poems about leaving—one of the prisoner’s choices-- brings the narrative arc back again to a final wound. “The Persistence of Holes” is a study in grief, and ends the collection on a melancholy note: “Come here, she might have said. Hold me.”


"Richard Lovelace defiantly proclaimed that 'stone walls do not a prison make' but the implication is that we make our own prisons and they can be anywhere: a car, a house, your own body, a sunlit street. Cheryl's poems are letters from prison, from all these prisons and more, but the book is not confining. Over and over again, we are given hints about how to make the most of our stay.I spent a good deal of time wondering just what the 'prisoner's dilemma' might be.I never found a definitive answer, but the book left me with a strong impression that the dilemma is whether or not to accept one's sentence. Do you become Houdini or King Rat? Typical of a poet, Cheryl wants to be both at once, and in these pages, it seems almost possible." Don Zirilli, contest judge

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