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Spring 2008
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CB Follett's fifth book of poems, Hold and Release, came out this year, and her new chapbook, Runaway Girl, received a prize in the Pudding House Press Chapbook contest. At the Turning of the Light won the 2001 National Poetry Book Award. She has several Pushcart nominations and is publisher and co-editor of RUNES, A Review of Poetry.
Poems
A waltz of vowels and the way
one line sings into another.
How it's tea with Grandmother today
and Attila the Hun with an army
of swords tomorrow.
Words gather smells as they go,
curl the tongue around taste
until juice dribbles off the chin.
It's how the brazen O in boot
becomes the seductive O in love
and you can set sail on waves of W
as they wash through the lines.
When I hear poetry, I hear the poet
climbing around in her words,
putting her sure steps on stanzas
as they migrate down the page.
I imagine the words like logs
snagged at the turn of a river, piling up
into a clot of wood, until with a roar
they break and torrent away,
words rounding the turn of the line
to shoulder down the page,
picking up speed until they crash
against a period.