Shawna Lemay

From the bestselling author of Rumi and the Red Handbag comes a new collection of brief essays about the intersection of poetry, painting, photography and beauty. Inspired by the words of Virginia Woolf, Lemay welcomes you into her home, her art and her life as a poet and photographer of the every day. Lemay shares visits to the museum with her daughter, the beauty in an average workday at the library, and encourages writers and readers to make an appointment with flowers, with life.

Do you believe in angels? When Xaviere is tasked with transcribing taped interviews her deceased friend Daphne left to her in her will, she begins to piece together the story of the photographer Irene Guernsey, a moderately well known but elusive photographer Daphne was interviewing. Irene's mysterious images captivate Xaviere as they had Daphne. Irene had never given interviews or talked about her work publicly, but near the end of her life, she reveals the magic hidden in plain sight in her mysterious and ethereal photographs and her attempt to capture angel wings on film. And once the angels appear, the reader is taken on a journey that spans decades and changes the lives of multiple women along the way. Everything Affects Everyone, /em> is a novel about listening, about how women speak to one another, and about the power of the question.

What is the soul? asks Rumi, the poet. If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks. Rumi and the Red Handbag follows the lives of Shaya and Ingrid-Simone, working together one winter at a second- hand clothing shop. Theodoras Fine Consignment Clothing shop becomes a small world where Shaya, an academic who abandoned studying the secrets of women writers, finds in Ingrid-Simone a reason to begin writing again, on scraps of paper and post-its. Fresh, unique and intelligent, Rumi and The Red Handbag is a journey to the Museum of Bags and Purses in Amsterdam, a journey to find Rumi, the soul, and the secret hidden in a red handbag.

The Red Velvet Forest is a sequence of poems exploring themes of silence and solitude, dream and forest. The poems are organized into three sections, titled, The Circumference, Lost, and Red Velvet Forest. The sections reflect the stages of a personal spiritual quest.

Shawna Lemay scrutinizes some of the best-known art masterpieces of the Western World, alerting her readers to the power and peril of seduction. "All the God-sized Fruit" melds the sister arts - poetry and painting - in a sensual exploration of history, forgery, and violation. In poems rich with sensory pleasure, Lemay explores the place where image and inspiration meet.