Pleasure Boat Studios Mary Lou Sanelli 'Women in the Garden'

*Read Review by Madeline DeFrees: Click Here
Announcing a new book from Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press Women in the Garden Poems by Mary Lou Sanelli ISBN: 1-929355-14-9 Price: $13.95 (trade paperback) * 64 pages Mary Lou Sanelli was raised in Connecticut, educated in Boston, and now lives and works in Port Townsend, a small coastal town located on Washington state's Olympic Peninsula, and in Seattle's vibrant downtown Belltown district. Sanelli's previous collections include Close at Hand (High Plains Press), Long Streaks of Flashing Daylight (Blue Begonia Press), and Lineage (Empty Bowl Press). Her poems have also been published widely in journals and anthologies including The Seattle Review, Calyx, Crab Creek Review, Pontoon, and others. Her work will appear in Woven on the Wind: A Collection of Western Women Writers (Houghton-Mifflin, 2001). She coordinates Port Townsend's celebrated Sunday at One Poetry Series, now in its fifteenth year, and she is Artistic director of The Moving Arts Dance Company. "Sensuous, sensual, brave and insistent, Sanelli's work shows the enclosures we tend provide no refuge. Cruelty, violation, aging or sudden death aren't invaders; they've been under our feet all along: "the world, suddenly, too over-exposed / to see, too piercing to hear." This gardener is an honest dancer, unprotected by pose. Her poems lead us out of self-consciousness into the risk of presence and truth, each next step a rescue from falling: "knowing no words adequate / to manage so much." - Jody Aliesan "Sanelli's garden entwines our world, filled with the cyclic movements of loss and redemption. In these observant, compassionate poems, she tends it well. - Linda Bierds "I came away from her poems resolved to look more intimately at life and with a fervent desire to write down my own observations. That alone is the highest compliment I can pay this excellent poet." - Laurie Wagner Buyer, writing about an earlier book, Close at Hand, in The Bloomsbury Review "When Mary Lou Sanelli reads her work, her energy says to audiences, these words or images or ideas exist in this poem for a reason - listen to them and pay attention. Because she performs her work this way, her listeners help make the poem as she is reading it." - Carmen Germain, Foothills Writer's Program	My neighbor drenches her yard, pumps water into a garden gone to seed, pitiful heap of weeds, but I don't think of wastefulness rather how her white curls lie in stark contrast to a rosy scalp, visible through her hair as a wound, pink as a tropical morning and how spraying mist from an uncoiled hose lends serenity to her whole, smooth face. [ excerpt from "Women in the Garden" ]

*Read Review by Madeline DeFrees: Click Here

Announcing a new book from Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press

Women in the Garden
Poems by Mary Lou Sanelli
ISBN: 1-929355-14-9 Price: $13.95 (trade paperback) * 64 pages

Mary Lou Sanelli was raised in Connecticut, educated in Boston, and now lives and works in Port Townsend, a small coastal town located on Washington state's Olympic Peninsula, and in Seattle's vibrant downtown Belltown district. Sanelli's previous collections include Close at Hand (High Plains Press), Long Streaks of Flashing Daylight (Blue Begonia Press), and Lineage (Empty Bowl Press). Her poems have also been published widely in journals and anthologies including The Seattle Review, Calyx, Crab Creek Review, Pontoon, and others. Her work will appear in Woven on the Wind: A Collection of Western Women Writers (Houghton-Mifflin, 2001). She coordinates Port Townsend's celebrated Sunday at One Poetry Series, now in its fifteenth year, and she is Artistic director of The Moving Arts Dance Company.

"Sensuous, sensual, brave and insistent, Sanelli's work shows the enclosures we tend provide no refuge. Cruelty, violation, aging or sudden death aren't invaders; they've been under our feet all along: "the world, suddenly, too over-exposed / to see, too piercing to hear." This gardener is an honest dancer, unprotected by pose. Her poems lead us out of self-consciousness into the risk of presence and truth, each next step a rescue from falling: "knowing no words adequate / to manage so much." - Jody Aliesan

"Sanelli's garden entwines our world, filled with the cyclic movements of loss and redemption. In these observant, compassionate poems, she tends it well. - Linda Bierds

"I came away from her poems resolved to look more intimately at life and with a fervent desire to write down my own observations. That alone is the highest compliment I can pay this excellent poet." - Laurie Wagner Buyer, writing about an earlier book, Close at Hand, in The Bloomsbury Review

"When Mary Lou Sanelli reads her work, her energy says to audiences, these words or images or ideas exist in this poem for a reason - listen to them and pay attention. Because she performs her work this way, her listeners help make the poem as she is reading it." - Carmen Germain, Foothills Writer's Program

My neighbor drenches her yard, pumps water
into a garden gone to seed, pitiful
heap of weeds, but I don't think of wastefulness
rather how her white curls lie in stark contrast
to a rosy scalp, visible through her hair
as a wound, pink as a tropical morning
and how spraying mist from an uncoiled hose
lends serenity to her whole, smooth face.

[ excerpt from "Women in the Garden" ]