Falling Awake Is Poetry In (E)motion

Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance. – Carl Sandburg

Oscar Wilde once said something to the effect that every portrait painted with feeling is truly a portrait of the artist, not the subject. I suspect there’s some truth to that, and also suspect the same can be said of poetry. What is poetry, after all, but a portrait painted with a palette of words rather than colors? It begins with a thought, an emotion, an event, and ends with absolution for the writer as he examines and exhumes and purges himself of the feelings that have prompted him to bare his soul, or, at the very least, his heart; to take those emotions and turn them into myriad hues of musical words on a colorful scale.

Anne Brooke, Ewan Creed, Hank Edwards, Owen Keehnen, and Geoffrey Knight are the artists who have joined together in this collaborative effort called Falling Awake, a collection of poetry that speaks of loss, betrayal, denial, faith, sex…love. Each piece is but a small window through which the reader is able to catch a glimpse of the authors’ creative talents, each piece telling a story—a beginning, middle, and end—in all the rich tones of a free-form and lyrical language. The collection is aesthetic, much like a portrait, and much like those tangible forms of art, the beauty of Falling Awake will be in the eye of the beholder. But the true beauty of poetry is that, unlike a work of art hanging in a museum, once the poet shares those words they then belong to the reader as well, becoming an emotion in motion.

Falling Awake, in some ways, reads like flash fiction that has been structured with a cadence and rhythm all its own. This collection is being offered as a FREE download from Wilde City Press. If you enjoy poetry at all, I highly recommend grabbing this one as soon as you can.

Reviewed by: Lisa

You can download Falling Awake here: