John Palen
Strange & Wonderful Creatures
by John Palen
ISBN: 987-1-962405-13-1
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About the Book: Art and life have a good long chat in this new book by John Palen. Starved of visual stimulation during the Covid shutdown, Palen turned to the work of Pablo Picasso, who pioneered a way of capturing the fluidity, complexity and craziness of being human on this planet. The resulting nine ekphrastic poems on Picasso paintings anchor poems exploring family, work, sex, love, music, and a broken world in need of repair.
Advance Praise:
John Palen’s new book begins with portraits from the animal and human families: a grizzly bear sow, his own mother’s primal bonding, poems on his father as Picasso’s “Boy Leading a Horse” and as “a dandy from the wrong side of the tracks” whose “cancer broke in and took everything.” Ekphrasis reappears frequently. In “Small Pieces Refusing” after Picasso’s cubist portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Palen writes: “I wake before dawn in pieces. . . select a shirt and a narrative for the day.” In Palen’s hands, art and poet become one; he embodies each painting with close observation, humor, and wisdom. Must read!
Riding With the Diaspora
by John Palen
Winner of the 2021 Sheila-Na-Gig Editions Chapbook Contest
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About the Book: The title poem of Riding With the Diaspora doesn’t come until the end, but facets of the diaspora experience — scattering, displacement, migration, homesickness, alienation, otherness —build toward it throughout. Here are poems about displaced indigenous Americans and their migrant European displacers; descendants of enslaved Africans and refugees from Nazism; the poor, the elderly and the ill, alienated from society and their own bodies; conflicted products of small-town upbringings; even seeds and microbes, scattered westward across the plains with the unsettling “settlers” of American expansion. These provide a unifying theme — one which also offers moments of reconciliation and grace — to a book of solidly crafted, humane and powerful poems.
Advance Praise: In the middle of John Palen’s collection is the poem “Where We’re From.” That seems just right, because in accessible, musical language, Palen pays unsparing but compassionate attention to the people and places of America’s heartland. These are poems that explore such contradictions of the central United States as decency and dishonesty, beauty and plainness, love and “small hatred.” I can’t think of a better guide to this rich territory than Riding With the Diaspora.
— Matthew Murrey, author of Bulletproof, chosen by Marilyn Nelson as the winner of the Jacar Press 2018 book competition.
A shrewd observer and shapeshifter, in these poems John Palen speaks in many voices: as a white surveyor among the Sac and Fox, as his boyhood self, a painting, a connoisseur of small towns, a man cutting button blanks from mussel shells, a jack pine, a Cooper’s hawk. His Midwestern sensibility links an older world to the burgeoning diversity of today. Moreover, he provides a master class in the craft of poetry.
— Elaine Palencia, author of How to Prepare Escargots, Main Street Rag.
