Kirjahaku

Carol Lynn's Letters from Under the Banyan Tree is a delicate and deft-handed tribute to life's rituals. This woven tapestry of organic imagery and calm reflection evokes that breathless twilight moment somewhere between grief and hope, where wisdom can grow. Fawn Neun, Chief Editor - The Battered Suitcase

Epitaph for the Beloved is a compelling, poetic conversation in search of hope. It is written in a lyrical narrative style and includes several poems that have been nominated or won awards. Grellas delves into such topics as love, loss, and family with a new and inspiring view. Her writing incorporates the challenges of everyday life with softness, yet often surprising unpredictably. These poems are intimate and personal, yet speak to the human experience universally. Grellas' fifth full-length collection, carries with it a devotion to the discovery of emotions and all that makes us human. In this unflinching dynamic collection, Grellas examines the very evanescence of being, with an intuitive poetic heart. The following poems have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize: The Butterfly Room, A Few Concessions. Afterlight/The Miscarriage, was nominated for Best of the Net. In 2018, A Mall in California won 2nd Place for the Jack Kerouac Prize.

Epitaph for the Beloved is a compelling, poetic conversation in search of hope. It is written in a lyrical narrative style and includes several poems that have been nominated or won awards. Grellas delves into such topics as love, loss, and family with a new and inspiring view. Her writing incorporates the challenges of everyday life with softness, yet often surprising unpredictably. These poems are intimate and personal, yet speak to the human experience universally. Grellas' fifth full-length collection, carries with it a devotion to the discovery of emotions and all that makes us human. In this unflinching dynamic collection, Grellas examines the very evanescence of being, with an intuitive poetic heart. The following poems have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize: The Butterfly Room, A Few Concessions. Afterlight/The Miscarriage, was nominated for Best of the Net. In 2018, A Mall in California won 2nd Place for the Jack Kerouac Prize.

I've long been haunted by the dualities of Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas' poetry: life and death, forgetting and the preservation of memory, resisting death while recognizing its beauty... Implied by the title, these poems are divided into the "shared" and the "sacred," two large and meaningful parts to the collection. The "shared" poems are written mostly in sonnet form, as if Grellas' poems are also sharing a form with late traditional poets, and they focus on family stories and heirlooms, implying the shared aspects of family, meaningful relationships and friendships, and of course, art. The second section, the "sacred," focuses more on personal stories and the more personal takeaways from shared experiences, like how one perceives the family dynamic compared to another. This duality of the public and private proves to be haunting, especially in the poems that celebrate secrecy and memories never shared (until with us, the readers).What I've discovered after reading A Shared and Sacred Space is how each poem carries with it its own unique duality: its personal and collective power. I read some of these poems on an individual basis and loved them as they stood on their own, but now that I've read them as a part of a larger collection, I now better appreciate the larger resonance of these poems and the echoes they form across the collection. From love, motherhood, family heirlooms, and traditions, to religion and mythological echoes, to the hardships of feminism, mental and physical ailments, and the forever haunting loss of our furry loved ones, this "labyrinth of humanness unveiled" is a stunning collection of personal, shared, and confessional poetry that we surely all can relate to, and celebrate.Grellas lets us take a glimpse into the most treasured and personal aspects of her life, and like an ofrenda, a photo album, a guest list-by the end of the collection, all of us readers are those who have signed the guest book, leaving behind our own small contributions to poetry's collective memory and taking something of Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas' with us.-McKenzie Lynn Tozan, Lit Shark Magazine

A poet of the personal, Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas' book In the Making of Goodbyes takes us to the land of the heart, a transformative journey where in looking at the difficult turns of events in a life, we are tutored in humility, grace, and tenderness...Her imagery and emotion uplift and fortify. There's a flow to these poems and once in the current, you submit willingly, her voice so intimate that it feels as if she is speaking to you and only you: "Even now as you visit me in dreams, / I stroke the outline of an unseen being/ and hear the hymns of angels." To Grellas, relationship is everything-to nature, loved ones, the self. Her poems acknowledge our vulnerability as humans yet demand that we own up to the strength we have to embrace whatever life brings us. Wendy Patrice Williams, author of In Chaparral, Life on the Georgetown Divide, California

Laced with the elegance and spirituality of well-honed traditional and invented forms, Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas's new collection Alice in Ruby Slippers is an adult's romp through the surreal Wonderland we call life. Just as Lewis Carroll's Alice struggled with the myriad denizens down the rabbit hole, Carol Lynn's Alice, perhaps Carol herself, navigates a deeply poetic landscape of death-lost, gained, and unrequited love-terminal illness, troubled ancestry, and all that makes this world a place we should simultaneously cherish and fear. Alice in Ruby Slippers is a wonderfully imagistic search for sense in the crumbling ruin of our known world. And a wonderful addition to Stevenson's poetic menagerie. -Indigo Moor, Poet Laureate Emeritus, Sacramento, CA Alice in Ruby Slippers begs to be read aloud to an audience or a lonely room. These poems lean toward icons of the familiar in a voice we want to draw nearer to. Grellas finds the sweet spot between cadence and language, where rhyme feels unforced and inviting; her poems feel comfortable, gently complex, and warmly nostalgic.-Glenn Lyvers; Prolific Press.Alice in Ruby Slippers is intense, full of depth and beautiful yet haunting imagery in these poems plucked from the aching silences and shadows of darkness and grief to speak their most sincere and vulnerable truths.-Debbie Berk, Founder / Editor, The Stray Branch