The Wilderness House Literary Review was formed out of the desire of a group of writers and poets to create an online journal for their works. As promised this is a print summary of the best of volume 2.
In her fascinating poem cycle, Gloria Mindock jolts back into memory the roots of El Salvador's present day violence. Mindock coaxes to the page the voices of the dead who lie, less in peace, than in restless obsession with the atrocities they suffered. She brings forth as well the voices of the living who seem startled to find that they died somewhere between the horrors they witnessed and the grave they have yet to lie down in. Blood Soaked Dresses is a beautiful, harrowing first book. - Catherine Sasanov
These stark, candid, and radiant poems in Gloria Mindock's new collection give shape and space to voices lifted from the clutter and clamor that is the matrix of war. The war is upon us now, but poets forever have sung such lamentations and haunted us all too often throughout history. One thinks of Homer, Wilfred Owen, and Carolyn Forche. A fierce and generous tenderness and enviable humanity ungirds these unflinching poems. Mindock's is the voice we need to hear at this very moment. -Eric Pankey, author of Not Yet Transfigured
Hope and peace is pitted against relentless oppression and death in Gloria Mindock's Whiteness of Bone. Mindock gathers the eye witness accounts of the voiceless, the unheard, and crafts a voice in their stead. From El Salvador to Rwanda, Darfur to the Congo, mass graves and war crimes deafen and suffocate. Genocide is a quagmire of ruthless animal instinct, senseless violence, rape and torture, massacre and slaughter. When such darkness goes ignored, the gaping maw of the abyss grows ever larger still. Victims of war escape only to be confronted by the merciless apathy of the world. Survival is an exercise in learned helplessness. Mere existence is not living. The gutted and the mute fall silent. Yet what can poetry do? It is language when there are no adequate words. It is urgency, immediacy, and testimony. It is how compassion and empathy can pour themselves into the confines of silence and fill it up instead. When there is simply no explanation left for catastrophe and horror, it is poetry that can capture and cradle the souls of those decaying in fields of white bone.
In her fascinating poem cycle, Gloria Mindock jolts back into memory the roots of El Salvador's present day violence. Mindock coaxes to the page the voices of the dead who lie, less in peace, than in restless obsession with the atrocities they suffered. She brings forth as well the voices of the living who seem startled to find that they died somewhere between the horrors they witnessed and the grave they have yet to lie down in. Blood Soaked Dresses is a beautiful, harrowing first book. - Catherine Sasanov
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