Hello friend! Today is the book excerpt post that comes from a poetry book, LindaAnn LoSchiavo’s Women Who Were Warned.
Get to know the author: LindaAnn LoSchiavo
Tell me and my readers a bit about yourself!
Receiving mass-produced greeting cards with their clumsy rhymes and inadequate expressions sparked my interest in poetry as a pre-schooler. At age 3 ½, to remedy the problem of “awkward poetry” on birthday, get well, or holiday cards, I started my own card line with my Aunt Fay. She drew the pictures and I wrote the verses. Our handmade cards received compliments from family members, so I felt my rhymes were making a difference and bringing joy. I was often told, “You knew just what to say” and whether or not that was kind-hearted or truthful, it did not matter. A formalist was born before her 4th birthday.
Since I grew up in New York City, when I turned four years old, I was taken to museums in Manhattan, live performances, and to the theatre – not to children’s theatre but to Broadway shows meant for adults. However, at an earlier age, my father and grandparents had introduced me to the conflicts and plots of Italian Grand Opera. Right away I noticed that classic operas were almost always centered around a woman and Broadway shows were (at that time) focused on a man.
Here was a sexist imbalance I felt compelled to address as a new wordsmith and an aspiring playwright.
When I was nine years old, I wrote my first one-act play for a cast of five females. My drama ran for months onstage in New York City. The audience applauded loudly. Around the same time, I had a poem published in a school magazine. When I was 15 years old, one of my short stories earned a gold medal for literary achievement.
All this while, I was visiting a local library and reading a book a day. The pattern was set, the die was cast, and a wordsmith blossomed.
What inspired you to write this book?
What inspired me to write “Women Who Were Warned” was the sadness and sorrow that surrounds the lives of most women including myself.
How long did it take you to write this book, from the first idea to the last edit?
Building on a base of older poems that looked at women’s lives through the same lens, I added newer poems. It took about a year to create a cohesive chapbook with 29 poems.
What makes your poetry collection unique?
“My Dungeon Ghost” is about my inherited ability to communicate telepathically as well as my necromancy. This nonfiction poem charts an intimate friendship that began when I was 9 years old with an 11-year-old Catholic school classmate; under his influence, I developed my abiding interest in Medieval poetry. I went on to earn my first graduate degree in Medieval Lit — and he went on to murder people. From his jail cell, he summoned me back to him. This is our unique love story.
Who would enjoy reading your book?
Women who have faced pressure from men and felt powerless or objectified.
What’s something you hope readers would take away from it?
That women can help change the social pressures the next generation will face.
Do you have a favourite quote or poem in the book that you find yourself going back to?
Source: “My Dungeon Ghost”
Answer (1 line) –
Fantasy twitched, hid its murderous heart.
Answer (3 line sequence):
He dreamt of noble crusades, mighty steeds.
I thought about what constitutes the light
‘Round which friends gather, pull each other up.
What’s the best piece of advice you have received related to poetry and writing?
Read every day for at least two hours — and then write for the rest of the day.
If you could give a shout out to someone(s) who has helped in your writer journey, please feel free to mention them below!
Joshua Gage
Women Who Were Warned
Sometimes compact, sometimes expansive, the 29 poems in “Women Who Were Warned” emanate from adolescence and other liminal spaces, considering girlhood and contemporary womanhood — and the ways both are fraught with the pleasures and limits of embodiment.
Content notes: Death, suicide, self-harm, abuse.
Check out the trailer below:
Book Excerpt from
Women Who Were Warned
The Bridge Crossing
Suicidal dreams suspend questions of the night. Saudi sisters adrift in New York, darkness rowing them to sinister emirates. Penniless. Sorrow transported them to a souk where they barter, trading hunger for another afternoon in America. Fraught memories they finger like worry beads. A close-mouthed sky spits on the indigent. Dirty pigeons point to the river. They’ve become feathers, light in the arms of kismet.
gold and copper foliage release
the brittle branch with a whispered sigh
floating to meet the earth’s
patchwork carpet
their fate fulfilled
Staten Island Ferry. Accusing north winds whip open coats like a Customs Officer. The sixteen-year-old sister imagines gliding through the tide of clasped hands to a safe haven. Liberty’s torch reminds the twenty-three-year-old sister of Aladdin’s lamp, a jinni armed with wishes. Then a breeze strips a discarded sandwich of its wrapper. Like terns, these two foreigners scavenge for crusts. Ahead seagulls forage for food, squawking rude reminders like impertinent desk clerks.
catching sight
of bleary-eyed reflections
in the hotel’s cheval glass
they forgot
the emptiness beneath
Central Park. Facing east, they perform Salah. Women walk dogs, shiny dark hair free as a raven’s wings, legs bare unlike daughters of their desert homeland, always petitioning men for assent. Decisions will fly tonight, inked on postcards, explaining why return is impossible. Manhattan’s mud-tinged sky is brightening to blue. They walk uptown, guided by the path of Bow Bridge as ducks quack complaints. Still here?
doves nesting
at the lake’s edge
knitting a new home
out of trash
and exhausted leaves
George Washington Bridge. Unadorned steel. A domesticated red lighthouse squats at its base not unlike crusaders’ tombs, faithful stone pets guarding the foot. Warm weather wrestles with their heavy coats, rocks buried in pockets. Makeshift shrouds. Winds stir undependable shadows as they ascend, dare nervous legs to reach a high ledge. A dramatic draping is left to the older sibling. Consigning their sisterhood to the pledge of duct-tape, they jump in tandem. Submerged and gone, momentary mermaids, their mighty splash a proclamation.
boats glide over swells
dusk darkening the Hudson River
waves rolling off their backs
late autumn chill gathering power
approaching day of the dead
Note: Saudi sisters RotanaFarea, 23, and TalaFarea, 16, were found on the rocky banks of the Hudson River, duct-taped to each other. Bound together, they had jumped off the George Washington Bridge. Police discovered their bodies on October 24, 2018.
Sonnet: The Lady of the Dunes
In 1974 on Cape Cod,
That harsh assaulting song of gulls masked screams.
Long red hair placed on a bandanna, jeans,
Nude body on a towel, looking odd,
Both hands removed, jaw open as if sawed
By killers who pulled teeth, destroyed the means
Of learning her identity and cleaned
The crime scene. Now she’s only known to God.
No missing person’s report. No one sought
To claim or bury her. There was no sign
Nor clues that someone witnessed her demise.
Her mutilated corpse lay in the morgue,
Anonymously sealed in its cold shrine.
Justice is those monks chanting for her rise.
Note: “Lady of the Dunes” was the nickname for an unidentified woman discovered on July 26, 1974 in the Race Point Dunes, Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her murder remains unsolved, however, she was finally identified in October 2022 as Ruth Marie Terry (September 8, 1936 – c. July 1974)
Embodiment
My sister lives forever in six drawers
Where Mom maintains her clothing, worn, outgrown.
Preserved in cameras, she’s chambered,
Sealed shut like darkroom prints, unmoving face
Still undeveloped as her unspent youth.
Moored on his island of bad memories,
Her boyfriend, claiming self-defense, wears stripes.
Nighttime she’s back, soft stabled in seizures
Of stars or hovering in ghost orb’s mist.
A pinch of lonely air lifts blankets, hugs
Half of my bedding. No heat radiates.
The younger person I still am inside
Peers out. Instead of ghost dents on the sheets,
I see her shuffling the deck, smell smoke
From phantom joints, red lipsticked, decayed dreams
Beyond my line of sight, time’s taut trapeze.
I yearn to grab her wrist, yank heart and soul
From cold oblivion, yell, “Breathe again!”
Hope hops on life support, prepared to drag
Her from the brink and storm the underworld.
Geometry’s shades fade — — by dawn’s dispersed.
Interested?
Find this book on Goodreads and Amazon. Connect with LindaAnn on Twitter, Goodreads and her website.
If you are an indie author and would like to do a book excerpt, check out my work with me page for details.
Cover Photo by vaun0815 on Unsplash
Be First to Comment