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Tonight at DiVerse Gaithersburg 7 p.m.: A Night of Poetry

May 4 at 7 p.m. I’ll be joining Fran Abrams at the Casey Community Center in Gaithersburg, Md., for the DiVerse Gaithersburg poetry reading series.

You can register here. This is an in-person event.

Address of the center: 810 S Frederick Ave, Gaithersburg, MD 20877

Can’t wait to see everyone! May the 4th Be With You!

The Poet Who Loves Pythagoras by Fran Abrams

Source: Purchased
Paperback, 23 pgs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate

The Poet Who Loves Pythagoras by Fran Abrams is a delight. If you love math or don’t, it won’t matter as Abrams’ wry wit and precise storytelling will tickle your humor bone. She espouses her love of Pythagoras and his math in the opening poem, but she also has a few things to say about his philosophies. We all can’t be perfect, right?

What I love about Abrams’ work is that she can take the every day things we see and feel and make them new. Imagine the poem “Triangle” and see how Abrams transforms it into a poem about trysts and how people must have confused them with the word truss, one of the strongest architectural elements used. She juxtaposes the strength of the triangle with the instability of the tryst in just 7 stanzas.

Triangle (pg. 2)

the strongest shape
used in bridges and in trusses
to support floors and roofs

compression on legs
balanced by tension
across the base

difficult to break unless
one of the sides cracks—
then why is a love triangle

the same shape as a truss
how strong can it be
when it's made of two men

who love one woman or two women
who love one man or some other arrangement
of three not supposed to be in love

how long before one side
of the triangle will crack
causing the structure to fail

the answer becomes evident only
when someone realizes
they have confused tryst with truss

Her chapbook uses the base of math to explore our lives, making astute observations on love, family, and so much more. The Poet Who Loves Pythagoras by Fran Abrams is not to be missed.

RATING: Cinquain

Other Reviews:

About the Poet:

Fran Abrams lives in Rockville, MD. She holds an undergraduate degree in art and architecture and a master’s degree in urban planning. For 41 years, she worked in government and nonprofit agencies in Montgomery County, MD, where her work involved writing legislation, regulations, memos, and reports.

In 2000, before she retired, she began working as a visual artist. Then, after retiring in 2010, she devoted the majority of her time to her art. After attending a poetry reading in 2017, she realized she missed expressing herself in words and began taking creative writing classes at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, where she concentrated on writing poetry. In September 2017, she traveled to Italy on a poetry retreat that strengthened her commitment to writing poems. She now devotes the most of her time to writing poetry.

Since 2017, her poems have been published online and in print in Cathexis-Northwest Press, The American Journal of Poetry, MacQueen’s Quinterly Literary Magazine, The Raven’s Perch, Gargoyle 74, and others. In 2019, she was a juried poet at Houston (TX) Poetry Fest and a featured reader at DiVerse Gaithersburg (MD) Poetry Reading. Her poems appear in more than a dozen anthologies, including the 2021 collection titled This is What America Looks Like from Washington Writers Publishing House (WWPH). In December 2021, she won the WWPH Winter Poetry Prize for her poem titled “Waiting for Snow.” Her first chapbook, titled “The Poet Who Loves Pythagoras,” is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Her first full-length manuscript, titled “I Rode the Second Wave: A Feminist Memoir,” is out now from Atmosphere Press.

Mailbox Monday #729

Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.

It now has its own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.

Emma, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.

Here’s what I received:

Her Whole Bright Life by Courtney LeBlanc, which I purchased.

Her Whole Bright Life is a collection of poems that weave together the trauma and exhaustion of a life lived with disordered eating and the loss and grief of the death of the poet’s father. Love and hunger intertwine and become inseparable as the poet grapples to find, and listen, to both. With a distinct and feminist voice, this collection delves into a life now lived without a beloved parent, while trying to survive a pandemic and battling demons that have lived inside her for most of her life. With both fierceness and tenderness, we see a woman trying to find her place within her own body and within an ever-changing world. This collection of poems is both an elegy and an anthem – praising both those who’ve been lost and those who remain.

The Poet Who Loves Pythagoras by Fran Abrams, which I purchased.

The Poet who Loves Pythagoras is very funny at times, profound at others, and exceedingly well-done. Anyone who loves math or poetry or both will also love this book!

–Raima Larter, Author, Spiritual Insights from the New Science

In the aptly titled collection, The Poet Who Loves Pythagoras, Fran Abrams gives us a surprising perspective: the poet and the mathematician. In the first poem “Pythagorean Theorem,” she writes, “Few things in life are certain,” but we are certain of her talent and craft. At this convergence of math and poetry, Abrams strives for precision and economy, which is often the case in mathematics. She questions what we know as true and pure and opens its relationship to equations and proof. Whether she is discussing trying to find “true love” or the shortest distance between A to B, Abrams wants us to consider life’s puzzles—remembering what can stabilize the chaos of the everyday. She asks us to consider Pythagoras and his theorems and trust them with our hearts.

–Jona Colson, Author, Said Through Glass and Co-president, Washington Writers’ Publishing House

Equal parts clever and vulnerable, The Poet Who Loves Pythagoras wields the vocabulary of mathematics and science like a blade. Fran Abrams reveals a wry humor in poems such as “Solve My Life,” which makes available a series of calculations: “The number of siblings I have is equal to / the number ounces in a quarter pound…The number of children I have brought into the world / is the same as half the number of siblings I have…The number of pounds I have gained and lost and gained during my life / is higher than the highest speed recorded at a NASCAR race.” Parallel lines engage loneliness; a road trip becomes a matter of counting the miles, literally. Readers who prize the consideration of big questions, balanced against agile specificity of phrase, will delight in this quirky collection. To quote an Abrams title that playfully promises a commercial device to harvest extra minutes: “Save Time! Order Today!”

–Sandra Beasley, Author of Made to Explode

What did you receive?

I Rode the Second Wave: A Feminist Memoir by Fran Abrams

Source: the Poet
Paperback, 88 pgs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate

I Rode the Second Wave: A Feminist Memoir by Fran Abrams is a unique look at what it was like to live in America gradually moving toward providing equality for women. While it is still moving toward equality, this memoir provides a perspective on how far the country has come. Unlike the first wave in which women fought for the right to vote, the second wave emphasized the need for equal pay and opportunity. “Before the Revolution” opens the collection, setting the scene in which women’s job opportunities and men’s job opportunities were separated by gender in the newspaper. Then came Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique.

Abrams’ memoir is divided into three sections and each provides a glimpse into this second wave pioneer’s life. Through her current perspective, Abrams provides a look at the children of now and the children of her growing up years and how things were less scheduled, more free. I can see how things have changed through her eyes. But don’t be fooled that America was equal for all, despite its laws, race and other topics were talked about in whispers, rather than aloud.

“A Girl’s Education” and “It Doesn’t Add Up” will bring to light just how long the phrase “boys will be boys” has been around and enabled young men to take advantage of girls and women alike. It’s a reminder that further education and change is necessary. Abrams’ poems are a story of her life, but they are also reflective of America’s continued struggle to live up to its credo of “Land of the Free.”

"Seeing Myself" (pg. 34)
....
The words typical and average
rattled around my brain like expletives.
I was studying art and architecture.
Being unusual, no, unique,
was part of my self-image.
I was not a typical co-ed!

Abrams reminds us that like children growing into adulthood, identity evolves and changes. Identity is multi-layered, nuanced. Like America, our identities do not have to be stagnant, they can change. I Rode the Second Wave: A Feminist Memoir by Fran Abrams is a wave you’ll want to catch. Be sure to buy a copy for yourself and for someone who may need a reminder that freedom requires work. Complacency has no place in America’s revolution.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Fran Abrams lives in Rockville, MD. She holds an undergraduate degree in art and architecture and a master’s degree in urban planning. For 41 years, she worked in government and nonprofit agencies in Montgomery County, MD, where her work involved writing legislation, regulations, memos, and reports.

In 2000, before she retired, she began working as a visual artist. Then, after retiring in 2010, she devoted the majority of her time to her art. After attending a poetry reading in 2017, she realized she missed expressing herself in words and began taking creative writing classes at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, where she concentrated on writing poetry. In September 2017, she traveled to Italy on a poetry retreat that strengthened her commitment to writing poems. She now devotes the most of her time to writing poetry.

Since 2017, her poems have been published online and in print in Cathexis-Northwest Press, The American Journal of Poetry, MacQueen’s Quinterly Literary Magazine, The Raven’s Perch, Gargoyle 74, and others. In 2019, she was a juried poet at Houston (TX) Poetry Fest and a featured reader at DiVerse Gaithersburg (MD) Poetry Reading. Her poems appear in more than a dozen anthologies, including the 2021 collection titled This is What America Looks Like from Washington Writers Publishing House (WWPH). In December 2021, she won the WWPH Winter Poetry Prize for her poem titled “Waiting for Snow.” Her first chapbook, titled “The Poet Who Loves Pythagoras,” is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Her first full-length manuscript, titled “I Rode the Second Wave: A Feminist Memoir,” is out now from Atmosphere Press.

Book Launch: I Rode the Second Wave: A Feminist Memoir by Fran Abrams on Dec. 4 at 3 p.m. at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Md.

I am honored to help Fran Abrams launch her first poetry book, I Rode the Second Wave: A Feminist Memoir, into the world on Dec. 4, 2022, at 3 p.m. at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD.

I hope that you’ll join us as Fran reads from her collection, and I pepper her with questions about her work and her thoughts about the second wave of feminism.

Books will be available for purchase and, of course, Fran will autograph them for you! Refreshments will be served. Don’t miss out on that!

We do ask that you register for this FREE event. You can do that here.

I can’t wait to see everyone.

Mailbox Monday #710

Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.

It now has its own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.

Thank you to Velvet for stepping in when Mailbox Monday needed another host.

Emma, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.

Here’s what I received for Gaithersburg Book Festival consideration:

I’d Rather Be Called a Nerd by Dominic “Nerd” McDonald from Day Eight Books.

Dominic “Nerd” McDonald, the 2022 DC Poet Project winner, is the author of, I’d Rather Be Called a Nerd, a memoir-in-poems that fearlessly details the author’s intersecting experiences of repression and self-development. The intersecting worlds of hip hop, higher education, and literature combine in this book as an anthem for nerds everywhere.

“McDonald shines brightly and lights the path for those who will walk it next.” – Susan Scheid, author of After Enchantment

Breaking the Blank by Dwayne Lawson-Brown and Rebecca Bishophall from Day Eight Books.

Breaking the Blank is a spirited dialogue between poets—and a meditation on love, parenting, gentrification, money, and the literary life. In accessible free verse, haiku, sonnets, and other forms, Dwayne Lawson-Brown and Rebecca Bishophall honor the African American experience, make sacred the ordinary, and remind the reader of the marvelous in the everyday.

I Rode the Second Wave: A Feminist Memoir by Fran Abrams from the poet.

I Rode the Second Wave: A Feminist Memoir is an autobiographical story told in poetry through the eyes of a woman whose life paralleled the second wave of feminism, a movement that began in the 1960’s and focused on equal opportunities and equal pay for women.

The second wave changed the expectations of women from the homemakers of the 1950’s to career women. The author was a freshman in college in 1962 determined to enter the workforce in a professional position. After completing her graduate degree in 1969, she was rebuffed in job interviews by men who assumed she would leave her job soon after she married and had children. She accepted a job in an office where she was the only professional woman. She married in 1970, had her first child in 1976 and her second in 1984. She worked for 41 years, retiring in 2010.

Placing her story in the context of women’s marches and feminist goals, the author tells how she grew up in a world that expected women to become homemakers and how she combined her desire for a professional career with marriage and motherhood at a time when mothers with careers were just starting to be accepted in our culture.

We by Sarah Freligh from Small Harbor Publishing.

This me-too guide to We takes a deep dive into golf greens, mom & pops, cornfields, & figure salons to rescue the wreck eons of Kingship has wrought on everyone from the school shooter to Cassiopeia & the holy roller girl. Freligh’s voice is fresh & flagrant, tender as it is Olympic, the curse that works its own godspell—& this book broke my heart open.

—Jane Springer, author of Dear Blackbird and Murder Ballad

Slowly/Suddenly by Allison Blevins from Small Harbor Publishing.

“If I can give myself anything, let it be a way into anger,” a reasonable creed for navigating a life continually demanding passivity toward the violence and loss it inflicts. Allison writes the plights of mothers, daughters, lovers and spouses in a voice that endures scars and calluses but refuses to accept them as necessary. “Some unbecomes happen slowly.” This book provides precise detail of ascendance above survival.

Handbook for the Newly Disabled by Allison Blevins from Small Harbor Publishing.

“Allison Blevins’ lyric memoir, Handbook for the Newly Disabled, is a whirlwind of stunning and startling reflections on the body, disability, memory, and motherhood. Nostalgia blends with the present, a self trying to make sense of pain. ‘What is left in my body to confess?’ she asks. Those of us who have lived chronic pain and illness will find ourselves understanding all too well. Those who haven’t will gain new insights into what a disabled life can feel like. ‘All of us will never be something we might have been. You see us smiling in our chairs, leaning on canes in commercials for pills and infusions. To love me, put your legs in ice.’ Spending time immersed in the world of this book helped me, as a disabled person with chronic pain, feel seen and less alone.”

—Alana Saltz, author of The Uncertainty of Light and editor-in-chief of Blanket Sea Press

Handbook for the Newly Disabled is a beautiful lyric memoir of disability: of the dailyness of grief, parenting, queerness, and pain in the setting of navigating illness. Allison Blevins writes gorgeously around, inside, and through illness, welcoming and challenging readers on every page, in every lyric turn.

—Krys Malcom Belc, author of The Natural Mother of the Child

For a very long time we have needed Allison Blevins’ lyric memoir, Handbook for the Newly Disabled. The lyrics are in quintets with titles such as “Brain Fog” and “My Neurologist (Who Doesn’t Have MS) Explains Pain Is Not a Symptom of MS.” For a very long time we have been reading books by physicians instead of books by disabled poets. “This is the chapter about hope. Fuck him,” one line reads. “I’m alive in Missouri,” another line reads. Blevins’ lyric memoir expertly talks back to medical ableism and, more than that, makes self-determination into an art.

—The Cyborg Jillian Weise, author of Cyborg Detective and The Amputee’s Guide to Sex

Ladies’ Abecedary by Arden Levin from Small Harbor Publishing.

An abecedary, or alphabet book, teaches letters, the primary pieces of language and of story-making. In Ladies’ Abecedary, each letter is a woman, each woman is a poem, and each poem is a narrative of female identity. These micro-biographies-in-verse present a series of anonymous characters (historical and mythological, contemporary and composite, unique and universal) in a collection that reveals “the diverse and complex nature of women’s interior and external lives.” Letter by letter, Ladies’ Abecedary “exemplifies the importance of the project to reclaim voice, agency, and equality for women,” and raises a remark about how a woman’s story is told.

What did you receive?