Metamorphosis

It's interesting the way a theme emerges and re-emerges in a body of work. This drawing is from Janet's first book Flytrap (Cleveland Poets Series) and she's still exploring the theme of metamorphosis--of image into space, the fusion of figurative and abstract-- in her new work. A good theme is like true love, people; it lasts, and you never get sick of it.

Come to think of it...

 Announcing, with great pleasure,  Janet's new book of poems and paintings on the theme of thinking. Come to Think of It: paintings and poems 

...and the prizes go to...

Thanks to all who submitted their funny mother-in-law cooking story to the Mother's Day Contest to win a copy of Shiva's Arms, and congratulations to our two winners: Dan_Doll and Anon!
The prize-winning entries-

The first day I met her, she was cooking seafood. I said, "What's that?" and instead of tentacles she mistakenly told me "testicles."

The first time I cooked an Easter ham for my in-laws, I used my mother-in-law's recipe of baking the ham in a brown paper bag; her ham always turned out so delicious, but mine didn't, since I forgot to take off the plastic that covered the ham. The cake I made from scratch didn't go over so well either--I don't know how I screwed that one up, but you could tap on it with the handle of a butter knife and think someone was knocking on the door!

What's Cheryl's novel Shiva's Arms about, anyway?

From a seemingly simple clash of cultures between in-laws, Shiva’s Arms evolves into an exploration of freedom and the ties that bind, love and duty. Written in a lyrical style studded with startling imagery, the author uses South Indian myths and customs to explore questions of belonging--national, cultural, linguistic--as well as class and ideology. Life is breathed into very different characters, giving them each the space in which to tell their story.

Alice marries Ramesh, a man from a tradition she can’t fathom. Ram aspires to the modern way of life. Alice, eager to belong, embraces the culture her husband is trying to leave behind. At the beginning, even her wardrobe is like a costume--“She jangled an armload of gold-painted bangles…Her eyes were lined with kohl… Every time she took a step, an ankle- bracelet of little bells tinkled.” Alice is an "insider" who wants out; an "outsider" to the West, Ram wants in.

But Alice is the outsider in her mother-in-law’s mind. The old woman will protect family traditions at any cost, whether in India or on US soil. Alice’s authority in her own home is constantly challenged. Amma re-decorates at will, imposes Hindu rituals on the household, and since a child belongs to the whole family, indoctrinates her grandson, Sam, with Indian traditions. As the namesake of the god of creation and destruction, Amma Shiva both embraces and repels, emotionally destabilizing the fragile Alice, who seeks refuge in clinical depression.

Also in Alice’s world is Ram’s sister Nela, a brilliant, beautiful woman rendered un-marriageable by a romantic indiscretion. When she makes her bid for freedom, Amma disowns her, and forbids the extended family to ever speak her name again. Alice keeps up with her anyway, by telephone and mail. “She writes to me often, with news of the boy and my brother, always with plans for a trap for my mother,” Nela explains to Nigel, her longtime lover, as they sift through the latest photos of Sam.

The boy has grown up believing his aunt is dead. When he discovers the truth, he storms out to go to Nela, and shifts the power between Alice and the old woman. Amma’s health fails, and stripped to her essence, she must depend on Alice. With the help of the dishonored daughter, Alice does her duty with tenacity and ingenuity. She restores Amma to health, and in the process, heals herself.

“Samsara,” is a word that builds resonance throughout this book. This domestic sea, part of the endless cycle of birth and death, means different things to each of the characters: to Ram and Nela it is a trap, to Alice and Amma, community. But the struggle between the religious and the secular, the traditional and the modern is best exemplified by Amma Shiva, who sets the tone for a household in which relationships mean everything. That is what ultimately draws Alice in. In Shiva’s Arms, the theme of religion shows how one family uses it to care for one another in an unpredictable world.

Prisoner's Dilemma

Our collaboration of poetry and drawings is now available on AMAZON.Look inside:

...in which we present our new collaboration

Introducing Janet's and Cheryl's newest duet, a collection of oil paintings and poems from Scattered Light Publications called MEMENTO MORI. It's a 48 page, 6x9 inch paperback
on sale now for $13.00. If you'd like to try before you buy, there's a preview on the left side of the blog.

Prisoner's Dilemma, bigger & better

CLICK THIS and you will find the new revised ans expanded edition of our book, PRISONER'S DILEMMA. Someone called it "part art object and part extended metaphor," and that's a drawing from it, above.

Introducing Big Sid

A Review of MULTIVERSE

What a lovely surprise, eh? Thank you, Grady Harp, from the Snell sisters!


Far More Than A Poetic Experiment, May 30, 2009
By Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

MULTIVERSE by Cheryl Snell is a short collection of poignant poems that edge the idea of a MULTIple universe replacing the concept of a simple UNIverse. But lest the reader be afraid that the scientific aspect of this premise is prevalent in this collection, it must be pointed out that despite the original 'idea' of the title, the poems in this collection are immediately accessible, very beautiful works indeed.

The flow and meaningful content of this book of poems by a seasoned writer is made even more seductive by the addition of expressionistic paintings by Janet Snell. Rarely have poems been so well 'illustrated' or at least so integrated as they are by the two Snells working in tandem. At the heart of these poems and art is a sense of home, of the sounds of and sense of night, and the radiant meanderings of on seasonal strokes. And yet Snell knows how to bring all of nature together, to include humans, in a touching manner. For example:

DYING SEASON
By the time our father bolted
from his sickbed to squeeze
the nurse's breast, we'd worked
ourselves into a frenzy of waiting.

When he fell back on the pillow,
He's sleeping, we whispered.
He can't hear our words' mad buzz.

Outside, a dragonfly, transparent
wings on a blue-tinged stick,
hovered above a broken cricket
dragging though the backyard thatch.

It rose up, sudden as a mind changing,
and the room sagged with breath
held against the last thing we wanted to see:
a pair of wings escaping, the world left out of reach.

This is a collection of poems to be lingered over, like reminders of first views or experiences we usually keep to ourselves for fear that speaking of them will make them lost to us. Snell has captured these moments and we can only hope she will continue to write such tender thoughts as well as in MULTIVERSE.
-Grady Harp, May 09

...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.

A Wall You Can't See Over

This is the story of how our new book, Prisoner's Dilemma, came to be:
It's 2005, and Janet unscrolls a stack of new drawings in pen and ink, charcoal, lithocrayon, chalk and pencil. What’s the subject? Cheryl wonders out loud. Heads, Janet says. That is, the semi-abstract human head in various states of mind, its psychology graphically shown and connected to the abstract background by its particular vulnerabilities. Those are depicted and distorted through the artist's vocabulary, anchoring it to the background and making the metaphor succinct.

One drawing in this set came about when one of Janet’s friends showed her the brace on his broken hand. It looks like something Helmut Newton would photograph on a skinny Vogue model, Janet told Cheryl at the time. But where would Helmut place it on the model’s body? He never puts anything in the expected place. Hmm, Janet said and began to think in images, because Cheryl never heard another word about it until she saw the drawing called Split.

I think in images, Janet says. I work like an expressionist, with the figure in the style of the German expressionists, and the space, abstract expressionist. To present images in a more definite space, I improvise in a spontaneous vein. I’m led around by the brush in an automatic way that allows for sensitivity. Subsequent decisions are then made from practice and experience. Executed premeditated meaning makes lifeless art—--no improvisation, no process.

The touch of brush or charcoal to canvas or paper leads in an intuitive direction. When I'm doing a painting that I've already sketched out, the painting doesn't exactly look like the sketch--fortunately--or the process would get boring, with little room for imagination or spontaneity. The meaning in my work is the poetry between image and space—implied rather than overt. Landscape is abstract and can be felt. The figurative elements are the elements I often start with, with the space improvised.

In my drawings, I make figures in a space suited to them. Using the figurative head in an abstract space focuses the relationship between the figurative and abstract elements and lets the viewer experience the psychology of the human figure. To connect the head to its surroundings, I add various elements to establish the psychological relationship between head and space. I am especially interested in what happens when the space becomes an image.

The Prisoner's Dilemma series was done all at once. The poems followed slowly, with much back-and-forth and revision. False starts and paper cuts. Theme emerged, and fought for a toehold.The big connector between the sisters' work is their shared sense of melancholy. Janet's characters are always trying to see, or to connect, and Cheryl puts a narrative to the image and uses it as a springboard for her own. That's probably the biggest difference, within all the similarities.

Lopside Press

Po Picks

Like those year-end “Best” lists? Here’s one, with Cheryl’s picks of the poetry books she’s reviewed this year, and what she had to say about them:

What We Already Knew by Rick Cannon, Sheltering Pine Press
“Like William Stafford, Cannon focuses on simple details in everyday speech to examine the world around him. But the language is far from ordinary, nuances of phrase and image captured with interesting juxtapositions of words and stripped-down diction.”

Thirst by Patrick Carrington, Codhill Press
“In this chapbook, winner of the Codhill Poetry Chapbook Prize for 2006, the title announces the theme; the poems locate it in the personal. Patrick Carrington touches on several kinds of “Thirst”—for communion and connection, for a deeper understanding of faith and the way it operates in daily life.”

Dark Card by Rebecca Foust, Texas Review Press
“Foust’s use of poetic devices is as expert as her emotional spectrum is varied. Her line breaks reveal meaning in fresh ways, and her use of sound is a mark of her craft---the sustained vowels throughout “Instrument,” the single word lines in the final strophe of “Firstborn,” echoing the child’s first thin breath…”

The Sister Series by Carol Parris Krauss. Pudding House Publications
“The poems in Carol Parris Krauss’s The Sister Series involve movement of various kinds: hurricanes and snowstorms, boats and race cars, the flipping pages of paper movies…We meet sisters Sissy and Little Bit …in snapshot sentences that often begin with verbs, quickening the pace, recalling the motion of the hand drawn movies in the opening poem.”

Silent Actor by J. Michael Wahlgren, BeWrite Books
“J. Michael Wahlgren achieves an unusual cohesion in his first full length book of poems, Silent Actor. The collection is exhilaratingly experimental, but lyrical, and deeply felt. A sequence of interlocking poems in solid stanzas, two line stanzas, new forms that zigzag down the page, this collection has a novelistic feel.”