The Wall & Beyond has a new 5-star review, signed by Matthew, on Amazon.
Thank you so much, Matthew!
“The Mission”
May 31, 2014 — Joanna Kurowska
Watching again Roland Joffé’s 1986 movie The Mission (with Robert DeNiro and Jeremy Irons). Almost thirty years after its creation, the film seems to have gained some new significance. True, the “natives” are presented as patronized and unrealistically innocent, but the movie is an excellent study of power. During those thirty years, we have learned so much about the arrogance and immorality of power, ecclesiastic as much as secular. The Mission shows the unholy marriage between these two. A thought: Holy cow, the devil must love the church!
(from Musings)
A Tree Brain?
May 30, 2014 — Joanna Kurowska
A recent episode of Nova suggesting trees display some characteristic of what we classify as the “brain functions.” Suppose a tree has some brain functions. Suppose it has feelings. Which would it prefer, to become a poetry book or a junk mail?
(from Musings)
Musings
May 30, 2014 — Joanna Kurowska
Have you noticed that growing in power goes in the opposite direction to growing in freedom? I mean, at the personal level—as a person.
(from Musings)
INCLUSIONS update
May 26, 2014 — Joanna Kurowska
My newest poetry book Inclusions is currently available on Amazon.
Thank you for your support. I can write because of you—my readers!
These mostly short, lapidary lyrics present to the reader not only a fallen world of detritus, missed emotional connections, thoughtless consumption, empty gratification, but also a world of fragile and fleeting beauty, raptures that last “but a fraction of a second,” and art-making that redeems us. A town’s soul leaks away as globalization grinds everyone and everything to sameness; a bishop’s suit in a window is “a skin missing a body”; and a price is put on everything: “The trees have turned into business letters.” This is simply the “now,” as Kurowska sees it. But these are spiritual poems, though the god evoked—invoked—is not the property of any single group or mission. In the title poem, the speaker longs “to make sure/that i, too, am included/in the world deposited/on God’s tongue.” And always, the human possibilities, and the beauty of the world, are what we transcend to. In the final poem, to her son who asks what the meaning of life is, the poet replies, “Next to me, a feather swirls/In the air. A draft carries it/When the window is open” … To me, this is a lovely, non-Western image of the inclusion the poet prays for.
— James Cummins
Inclusions is a book of surprising, reflective encounters with things as small as ants and as big as God. The ants, however, are big enough to make us think about the meaning of life and death. God, on the other hand, is small and light enough to fit into a snowflake. The poems listen to silence, loved ones now gone, cupboards and birds. Joanna Kurowska’s slender verses pray by playing and masterfully lead the reader to the realization that “knowing is letting go.”
— Katia Mitova
JOANNA KUROWSKA 