Page 54 - Savoring

ABOUT THE POETS
I definitely CAN identify with)--whatever it may be. Dig in. Otherwise, why mess around? It’s the playing for keeps idea that I’m talking about. That’s what the little guy seemed to be saying to me that morning in the hospital.”
Bonnie Lievan, Brookings, SD, has lived throughout the U.S. pursuing three careers: laboratory medicine, biotechnology and higher education development. “Poetry lets words strut their stuff unconstrained by the mundane.” Bonnie has been published in The Briar Cliff Review and the Writers Digest.
Mary O’Connor, Sioux Falls, SD, is a Sister of Mercy, born in Ireland of Irish and English parents. With an MFA from Columbia and a PhD from UCLA, she has worked for the past two decades
in South Dakota. Her essays, short stories, and poems have been published in Ireland and the USA. Some of her poems have been heard on NPR. Most recently, her essay “Resilence and Survival: Immigrant and Refugee Women in South Dakota,” appears in a collection from SDSU, 2012, and a poetry chapbook, Windows and Doors, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.
“Some of my poems in this volume come from direct interactions with nature, or with Betty L. Beer’s paintings and the way they made me subsequently look at nature. The dancing poem additionally honors a ragged, enthusiastic, wholehearted ensemble I saw in the Cultural Center in Chicago. I wrote ‘The Young Men How Tragic’ after breaking down in tears while watching a DVD of The Motorcycle Diaries! The fog poem is seasonal, too, but it carries my memory of ‘chemo brain’ during cancer treatment a few years ago.”
Christine Stewart-Nuñez is the author of Snow, Salt, Honey (Red Dragonfly Press 2012), Keeping Them Alive (WordTech Editions 2011), Postcard on Parchment (ABZ Press 2008), Unbound & Branded (Finishing Line Press 2006), and The Love of Unreal Things (Finishing Line Press 2005). She teaches in the English Department at South Dakota State University.
“I find it a challenge to describe the pattern of my poetry while situated snuggly within the loom; I am both the thread and the weaver. So often, however, the emotional impulse for a poem comes from a need to understand an experience or phenomenon, or it may emerge from a wish to capture my perception of the sensual world.”
Marianne Murphy Zarzana, Marshall, MN, teaches writing at Southwest Minnesota State University. “‘No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.’ I love this quote by Robert Frost. It resonates with my writing process. Writing allows me to explore the world around me and the world within by putting pen to paper. To surprise myself by the words and poems that take shape. To tell my truth. To stay awake. Persona poems, such as the three I wrote in response to Betty L. Beer’s drawings, allow me to place myself inside someone else’s life and expand my perspective as I view the world through their eyes.”
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