Disorientation and the Weather

Auteur

Dorinda Hale, also published as Dori Hale, began writing poetry seriously while a graduate student at Western Washington University, where she earned an M.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing. During a long, eclectic career in a variety of positions-welfare caseworker, teacher, editor, housecleaner, typist, software documentation manager, translation project manager-she wrote and published sporadically in a number of journals. Disorientation and the Weather is her first chapbook. Most recently, her poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Passager, where "After Grief" was chosen for the 2017 poetry contest issue. Dori Hale lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, and occasionally escapes to her primitive shack in Vermont, where she's pretty good with a chainsaw or brush hog.

Texte du rabat

Disorientation brought about by new or frustrated love; impending death; or unfamiliar geography, both physical and psychological, engenders lyrical encounters with the self and others. Disorientation and the Weather is all about Relationship with a capital R. In the largest sense, these poems are conversations with the universe held by characters as disparate as an airplane passenger, a lover, a museum guard, a patient, a parent, a traveler, or even a dog. The weather infiltrates and colors their experience: rain on a humid summer night; the play of light and dark across snow in cold winter; a subtropical night on a beach. The poems would like to break your heart by juxtaposing what we know with what we don't know. And we survive, though not unscarred, with sangfroid and wit and the consolation of getting the words right. In what could perhaps be described as a search for the sacred in the secular, the poems ultimately come down on the side of love: how hard it is, how worth it.