BATTLE OF WHATSWORSE

By Larry “LD” Green

Illustrations by Zack Rezendes

DisGabeium Book Co.

Valley poet and artist Larry “LD” Green has a new work out, a medieval-flavored epic poem called “Battle of Whatsworse.” The hand-crafted, hardcover book, complete with black-and-white illustrations by comic book artist Zack Rezendes, is written in iambic pentameter and is the third in a series by Green.

It’s a bloody tale of a kingdom where people kill for sport and the king’s word is absolute law — and where the ruler likes to take part in the violence himself.

“Off go the only hands his limbs / will ever know how to grow. / To the ground in a mound, two hands / land with a red sticky spooge. / Sword drops too, King turns and / awaits what a victor is due.”

In an accompanying note to the book, Green says that even if the story is grim, it sadly mirrors “the military stranglehold that is going on in a large part” of the real world today.

There will be a full reading, with musical backing, of “Battle of Whatsworse” Tuesday at 8 p.m. on Valley Free Radio, WXOJ-LP 103.3 FM.

  

LITTLE TERRARIUM

By Hannah Fries

Hedgerow Books/Levellers Press

www.hannahfries.com

Poet Hannah Fries says the title of her first collection, “little terrarium,” refers to “the body that holds the soul and the world that holds all creatures.” In a mix of verse, from extended prose poems to shorter works that are something of a variation on haiku, Fries celebrates the natural world and evinces a sense of wonder about it.

In “Orb Weaver (Nephila),” she shines a light on the industrious spider, spinning webs that are “Five times the tensile strength of steel, / golden when sun-touched.” In “Early Morning,” she uses a misty dawn to question one’s own life: “sometimes you wonder / do I exist / you feel like the fog on the valley floor / that will disappear by noon …”

In “little terrarium,” published by Levellers Press of Amherst, Fries also includes seven poems inspired by seven corresponding paintings (reproduced in miniature in the book) by Winslow Homer, from “The Berry Pickers” to “The Life Line.”  

The latter, one of Homer’s most famous works, shows a woman being pulled from an ocean shipwreck by a cable and prompts Fries to write “But now, strung / on the lifeline between, a body stolen / from ruin, one hand on the rope, the other / hanging over a jagged wave — soaked clothes / cling to thighs, breasts, soft-shaped and rippable / flesh.”

Fries’ work has appeared in places such as American Poetry Review and Massachusetts Review and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She currently works as a project editor at Storey Publishing in North Adams and is a contributing editor for Terrain.org.

Hannah Fries will read from “little terrarium” Thursday at 7 p.m. at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst.

 

WOMEN OF CLARK HOUSE:
THE ART OF POSITIVE AGING

By Jeanette Miller

Levellers Press

www.levellerspress.com

In a culture that seems to worship youth, Jeannette Miller says there’s plenty of life to be found in the elderly.

Miller, a resident of Clark House in Amherst, an apartment complex for seniors, families and disabled people, is also the author of “Women of Clark House.” In the book, published by Levellers Press, Miller interviews a number of vibrant women in the building to give the lie to what she calls “the old stereotypical picture of the aged woman as forgetful, grumpy and beset with loneliness.”

There’s writer and political activist Mary Louise Wentworth, for instance, and dancer and artist Jacqueline Maidana, who’s taught dance in the Valley for 30 years and continues to do so as she approaches 70.

The women of Clark House, Miller writes, “have indeed mastered the art of positive aging.”

There will be a book launch for “Women of Clark House” Nov. 10 at 5:30 p.m. at Collective Copies in Amherst.