Photo: Mary Lou in NYC (Nov., 2007)
About
Mary Lou Sanelli
Sanelli
works as a writer, public speaker, columnist, and radio commentator.
Her latest book is Falling Awake: An American Gets A Grip On The
Whole Changing World One Essay At A Time (Aequitas Books, NY) which was
recently selected as “one of the most fabulous Pacific NW books” by
Seattle writer/reviewer Lesley Thomas.
She
has earned a solid reputation in the literary community through a steady
commitment to writing and through twenty years of successful public readings.
Her
essays appear, periodically, on the OP-ED page of The Seattle Times, as
well as regularly for Art Access, The
She
is the author of six poetry collections. Her poetry has been published widely
and was recently included in two anthologies of Western Women Writers published
by Houghton Mifflin. Her latest collection, Craving Water, Poems of Ordinary
Life In A
Honorariums
include an Artist Trust GAP Award, A Jack Straw Writers Award, The Skagit River
Poetry Festival, The Seattle Poetry Festival, The Seattle Bumbershoot Festival,
The Washington Poets Association Burning Word Festival, A 2003 writing residency
in Costa Rica, a 2004 residency at Cantagal in France, a 2006 writing residency
at Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain, and a 2007 La Napoule Art Foundation Residency
in France.
Her
staged reading from her collection The Immigrant's Table is an
acclaimed, original spoken duet that dramatically and poetically tells a story
of immigration, cultural adjustment and weaving Old and New Worlds together into
a rich fabric of memoir. It has been
produced at The University of Washington,
She
divides her time between Port Townsend and Belltown and presents her work at
corporate events, theaters, writing conferences & festivals, literary
venues, colleges and universities, book clubs, and private events.
| Read a review by Madeline DeFrees of Women in the Garden Click Here | |
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Women in the Garden Poems by Mary Lou Sanelli ISBN: 1-929355-14-9 Price: $14 (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 |
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" ] |