Glenna Cook’s Shapes of Time was just published by MoonPath Press.
“When I read Glenna Cook’s poems, Aaron Copland’s music plays in my ear. Her portrayal of life is simple, universal, and unnervingly complex. Cook’s Shapes of Time is an arc of a woman’s life, a life shaped by traditions and rhythm, a mirror of reflection. She gives us a litany of thanks, expressions of disappointment, unimaginable grief, unbridled joy, that in the end are unfinished—life cut short, for it is never long enough. We understand how she ‘will leave behind a long/list of books I wanted to read/friends I could have shared/pie…’ She compels us to ask don’t all want to share pie, to embrace life, its complexities, in the simplest, yet most poignant language?”
—Josie Emmons Turner, Tacoma Poet Laureate Emerita
Live on Zoom
[click this link to attend]
I dreamed you bought a car
against my knowledge and wishes.
A big, gas-guzzling, luxury monster.
I made up my mind not to forgive you
even though, in all our years of marriage,
I always did. Yet
how can I stay angry?
It was only a dream and only a car,
and you, my love, are gone.
Glenna Cook grew up in Olympia, Washington, where she married her husband, Kenneth, at age 18. They had three children (the oldest, a son, died of cancer in 2016), and have nine grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren. In 1990, she retired as training manager at U.S. West Communications, after twenty-five years of service, then immediately enrolled in college. She graduated from University of Puget Sound, Magna cum Laude, at age fifty-eight, with a B.A. degree in English Literature. While at U.P.S., she won the Hearst Essay Prize for the Humanities,and the Nixeon Civille Handy Prize for Poetry. She is a member of Phi Kappa Phi. In 2014, she was granted a residency at Hedgebrook, where she wrote some of the poems for this book. After years of living in Tacoma, she now lives in Puyallup, WA.
Michael Magee’s plays and poetry have been produced and published in the U.S., England, and Greece. His chapbooks include: Ireland’s Eye, A Trip to Jerusalem, and the recently published Dementia: Love is a Blur and Vanishing Points (Beaux Arts Press, 2017). His play Shank’s Mare was produced at Northwest Actor’s Studio and later became a movie which won a best actor award at the Bare Bones, Script to Screen Film Festival in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A Night in Reading Gaol With Oscar Wilde was produced here and in Derby, England. He was co-editor of 2020 Tacoma: In Images and Verse and is editor and publisher of Beaux Arts Press. Recent work has been published in Cirque and Journal of Wild Culture. He has lived in Seattle, San Francisco, London, Nottingham, England and now lives in Tacoma, Washington.
