Dream House

Look what just popped up on Amazon!

And THIS

Two more poems here! And yes, Virginia, it is raining.

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 

Pandora's Box

The gathering together of NEW WORK

Live Mannequin Envy

READ THIS !!!

Prisoner's Dilemma, Reviewed

OUTWARD BOUND

“Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.” *

But for mystics, the disabled and convalescent, those in enclosed orders, those dedicated to fulfilling their genius, those in jail and those who exist in a mental straitjacket, whatever the cause, there is always a conundrum:

Does the elusive Truth exist on the Inside or Outside?

Hostages like Brian Keenan, Anne Frank, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, all attested a life of the spirit and the imagination that would not and could not be limited by physical and ideological constraints.

So does narrowed focus confer a sharper and profounder vision, offering its compensations? Or is Freedom only to be found upon the exterior, in the prolix toil and muddle of human activity where opportunities for discovery abound? Even where choice is possible, aren't these states mutually exclusive?

Cheryl Snell in a new chapbook, Prisoner's Dilemma, explores this theme in situations concerning many kinds of effacement. Each short poem is offered like a remnant of woven fabric placed under the microscope so that the colours, slubs and knots and arabesques, can be appreciated. The imagery is often stark and reminiscent of Sylvia Plath, the emotion bottled which, unstoppered, pervades an air of vaguely fragrant stoicism. Where the subtext is menacing, it frets away at a blithe surface like a sliver of glass stuck in the weave. But, often, it's uncompromising, violent, in-your-face, leaving the reader with no more than the merest scintilla of hope. The images juxtaposed in Snell's phrases cleverly release new flights of meaning as, for example in Dirty Laundry:

Tumbling from the fold
of a fitted sheet – balled-up
silk, some foreign lace. Things come
and go in this house. Last night, an earring
tangled in the wrong colour hair, everything
gone bloodshot and damp.

The man's non-sequiturs circled the drain
of his stranger's ear: Let lovers go fresh and sweet
to be undone. How else to go
with a come-on like that – innocent as soap,
pink bubbles bursting like an alibi
on the verge of coming clean.

The collection as a whole hangs together with the shape and atmosphere of René Magritte's surreal painting The Empty Mask and, in miniature, I don't doubt is as accomplished. Cheryl Snell ably demonstrates that Richard Lovelace was right!*

RJC
(Rosy Cole)

Chapbook hauntingly illustrated by Janet Snell.

New Review, Multiverse

Cheryl Snell has collaborated with her sister, Janet Snell to bring forth an astute and staggering blend of poetry, science, and art in her Multiverse collection. Cheryl probes the evolving understanding of the physical world. Mulitverse, the title, is some what of a clever winking pun. It suggests the layers in poetry relate to the layers one finds in the scientific Multiverse concept. Multiverse, in essence, is a new theory claiming there is not just one universe but several, and some Physicists now think that there may be as many as eleven dimensions co-existing at once. In Multiverse Cheryl Snell pulls the string theory from physics and applies it to poetry. With the dramatic visual accompaniment of Janet Snell’s artwork, Cheryl takes the reader on an unexpected journey through the “The Natural Order of Everything.” This first poem of the sequence begins:

“It’s a trick. The sun aims wide-eyed light/though gauze breezes to filter out the truth”

Grounding the scientific concepts in concrete imagery the dimensions of existence are “filtered.” As light and dark can be measured mathematically and quantified in physics, so too can poetry measure light and dark in an attempt to quantify the affects of both. In her first poem, Cheryl attempts to “filter” out the truth of the light and the dark by using the metaphor of the predator the prey. She finds that words alone can fathom only part as she states, in conclusion, “I see there is no help for any of this/ I may as well start over.”

In trying to grasp the elusive meaning of nature and ones place in the natural world, Cheryl also explores relationships and the layers within those relationships. In her poem “Thermodynamics of Cooking Stone” she expresses the friction of co-existing as individuals in the binding construct of marriage. Rather then ending in a black hole she gives the reader a more hopeful image of togetherness:

“They’ll begin to satellite each other like shepherd moons/herding the rocks of Saturn’s rings/ around the low blue hum of heaven.”

The imagery Cheryl uses throughout this collection is startling and evocative. For example, in “Fight or Flight” Cheryl dares to tread the oft trod path of the “heart.” I have to say I approached the poem with prejudice having not read a poem, no, not one contemporary poem, with the word “heart” in it that I would say I felt was a successful poem. This poem, in my view, succeeds. Turns of phrase such as: “The tongue, stiff as road-kill…it also let’s the heart believe it can leap through the throat to freedom,” rejuvenates the bleeding heart cliché’ and turns it into something new.

On the intellectual side of things, one can see the influence of the concepts of physics in her poetry. In “Flicker Vertigo” she references the beginning of the universe and man’s attempt to comprehend his experience within this universe. She concludes with the mind bending statement “The brain fills in what’s missing, the blanks/ between light and light, a corrugated sky hanging over the theater’s false ceiling.” The impression of reality being a “corrugated sky hanging over a false ceiling” leaves me wondering what reality is. If the brain creates the missing blanks is this life a “false theatre,” a creation in our mind, or is the “false theatre” the existence outside of the mind? Cheryl’s collection is if full of such constructs which provoke exploration and discovery.

As a whole, Mulitiverse is a collection that satisfies both the intellectual and spiritual aspects of poetry. Cheryl Snell uses language with sensitivity and an intelligence that is as refreshing as it is profound.

---Mel Huber

Gold Wake Press

The new anthology COLORS has just been released by Gold Wake Press. Two of Cheryl's poems, Pink and Blue, are in it. See for yourselves...

Belinda Subraman's new book

New Pubs

The sisters make an appearance INTHEFRAY right here.
Thanks to Annette Hyder, editor of the Imagine section, who is a joy to work with.

Two Kinds of Stories

Cheryl had a story chosen for The Flask Review's (link at right)"Best of" anthology.

Janet likes how the West Side Leader described her work as "a marriage of abstract and figurative styles with an interest in psychology of the human head and figure."

Cheryl's poem is not about Janet:
She Paints Herself into a Corner

She takes a crayon to the backs
of envelopes, to the cardboard
from laundered shirts. She steals India
ink and black velvet for angry clowns
and the many faces of Elvis. Worked-over
images soon overflow the closets, tumble
into the hall. Stacked to the ceiling, there
is no room for light to enter, so the painter
moves over the dark, stained floor like a shadow,
back and forth and back again—until she falls
out of her own frame of reference, still believing
in what the day can do.

But Janet's drawing has Cheryl in it:

...in which the sisters put the Labor in Labor Day

Janet has this painting in the Fresh Art show now at Summit Art Space.

SAS will host another show in October with the theme of Boxes. Some of the 2-D artists have been asked to participate, and Stacked Boxes , shown above,is the drawing she's thinking about entering.

Then there's the duo show on September 8 at AoRC. So many paintings, so little time to frame them!

Sister Cheryl is busy over at the Shiva's Arms blog, but would like to remind us that she has a poem out in Tipton Poetry Journal, another up at Panamowa, and four forthcoming in Miranda Literary Review.

Show-off.