Friday, February 3, 2017

Announcing the February Author in the Spotlight.

Announcing the February Author in the Spotlight.

Oh Yeah!  Happy February.
The groundhog is in the house,
love is in the air and
there are a lot of really good
books out there.

Bam. I made a short poem rhyme.  Can you tell I'm feeling silly?

Let me add that this month, on Sunday, Feb 5th, marks my blogging anniversary and I have been blogging for a full 7 years.  Crazy!!

Plus I have been featuring amazing Minnesota Authors on Booksnob for 6 and a half years now, that is like 12 authors a month for over 6 years which equals= a LOT of authors.  And there are so many MN authors I love and met through writing this blog and so many authors from Minnesota that I haven't read yet.

This month's author is Su Smallen.  She is an amazing poet with two new books out by two different presses and you are going to love them.

Here are the synopsis from Goodreads:

Kinds of Snow

Nature provides the lexicon of de Kooning Snow. The poems inde Kooning Snow negotiate many kinds of loss, metaphorically represented as kinds of snow. Classifications of snow, such as prisms, cups, columns, dendrites, and scrolls, mark places among the poems as when, in a weaving, the warp becomes visible. The title poem frames presence, meaning, memory, and erasure. Several of the poems are contained in panels like Rauschenberg sWhite Paintings. As the poem Glacier reflects, the arc of the book is lyrical rather than narrative, from point A to point A, no point at all. The poem The Last of placed second for the Joy Harjo Poetry Award judged by Dorianne Laux. Three of the poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize; ten have been anthologized.

You This Close

Poetry. illustrations by Jessica Zeglin. YOU THIS CLOSE is a rippling work encompassing love and water, longing and the natural world. Su Smallen wrote these poems during a residency with the St. Croix Watershed Research Station, where she learned about aquifers and diatoms from the scientists there, kindred in their curiosity about the elegant ways nature works. With imagery from the river and its creatures, the poems of YOU THIS CLOSE are linked together with the last line of one becoming the first line of the next, making a structure that matches a kind of diatom chain. The poems are also about hope for love, addressing a beloved not yet met.


This month you can expect a book review, a giveaway, an author interview and hopefully a guest post.

You can find Su Smallen on her website at https://susmallen.com/

Happy Reading!!