Melons and Memory
By Helen R Peterson
($18.95, (7” X 10”) Paperback, 152 pages)
Melons and Memory: by Helen R Peterson is a very impressive début poetry collection. She writes in her introduction: “Elizabeth Barrett Browning once referred to the genius of memory as “choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.” In this collection, I present to you three such hunks, juicy, sweet in youth, just a tad bitter and tough the closer you bite to the rind of adulthood.
I’ve amassed enough poems along this theme for a book that covers a wide range of emotions. Falling in love and getting married, falling out of love and getting divorced, the birth of two children, the raising of three, it’s all found its way in one form or another into this book. As well as poetry, there are a few pieces of flash fiction, vignettes of life, and prose poems.”
REVIEWS
“Helen’s poetry invites you to tea. When you sit and sip, the poems will explode through you, making you wonder if it’s the jolt of the caffeine or is it the high wire of life you are involved in.”
—Timothy Gager, Author of Anti-Social Network and Treating A Sick Animal.
“We all know the journey Helen Peterson’s on in this book, but that familiarity only serves to heighten the impact of these stellar poems. In family, love, sex, all the subjects of life on this earth, Peterson gives us the full report in language always careful and often sublime.”
—Rusty Barnes, Founder/Co-editor of Night Train Publications and the Author of Mostly Redneck.
