Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

(Forthcoming from Marick Press, 2010, http://www.marickpress.com, Price: $14.95, ISBN 13: 978-1-934851-12-8) In the past 12 months I have had the opportunity to review several collections written by poets who are producing works stemming from their condition of being a Westerner in the East or vice versa. The time for such catalogued experiences is certainly ripe—with the United States and Asia having no choice but to come to terms with one another economically and otherwise, and the growing realization (from a small but potent population) that the future of our world must exist in a place that honors Uniqueness without fortifying Boundaries, such dichotomy-breaking insights are keys to the doors of New Possibility. Who better to keep those keys than the modern poet? From Sze-Lorrain’s bio we learn the following: She was born in Singapore and “grew up in a hybrid of cultures.” She attended school in Britain, the United States, and France. She has performed worldwide as a zheng concerti...

In today’s self-help book market, finding something new is becoming harder and harder. In many ways, it’s all been said before, and often times far better, by far wiser people. It was with this challenge in mind that I began reading C. Clinton Sidle’s This Hungry Spirit. The year was coming to an end, I had thoughts of resolutions and self-betterment for 2010 at the forefront of my mind, and as I shuffled through the stack of books I had to review, it seemed like as good a choice as any. Sidle’s credentials are impressive. He is director of the Roy H. Park Leadership Fellows Program in the Johnson School of Management at Cornell, as well as being a leading authority on leadership, executive coaching, and developing human potential and author of two other books. So what was different about This Hungry Spirit? First and foremost, I found Sidle’s honesty about his personal life and challenges to be genuine to an extent that I have not seen in a long time in books such as this. While most ...

“Far from the Fool”: A Review of John Gartland’s Gravity’s Fool (2009, Assumption University Press, ISBN: 974-615-242-4) by Joey Madia Many a modern poet has stacks of unsold books filling the corners of his or her writing room. This is a matter of both competition as well as the lamentable lack of interest in poetry in today’s reader. Perhaps as condensed forms of Communication continue to emerge, based on the requirements of Social Networking sites, poetry will re-take its place in readers’ daily lives. In the meantime, it is good to know that some poets, such as John Gartland, are putting out additional editions of their titles. This fourth edition, published by Assumption University Press, features a new final poem and a few words by Steve Conlon, Dean of the Graduate school, about Gartland’s collaboration with Tom Hodgins (Poetry Universe 1: Poetry without Frontiers, which I will be reviewing later this year). Gartland is a novelist, playwright, and poet, and a founding member of ...