Nice to know that, more than a year after its publication, new readers are still trying White Shirt on for size. Lovely review posted on Amazon.com a couple of weeks ago by Rob Jacques of Puget Sound; here are just a few snippets:
Poems about an implacable determination to experience joy
Laurie MacFayden’s poems are bright, colorful splashes of language with highlights of rhyme and meter that capture human angst about love, youth, and yearning — boisterous, roughhousing, tomboyish poems. But for all of their energy and muscle-flexing, they have a wonderful, carefully crafted artistry that contains and balances their zesty play on words, zany metaphors and sexual exuberance.
“The collection opens with a poem that’s going to be anthologized for the next couple of centuries: ‘My Date With Jackson Pollock.’ MacFayden probably spent a year working out the absolutely magnificent, colorful linguistic twists and curls that exactly duplicate a Jackson Pollock painting, the poet bursting with the same highly charged, only partially contained life-energy of the painter. The provocative socio-sexual interplay between the narrator and the painter is an intense thing of beauty in itself, and the poem rewards discerning re-reading with fresh connections between paint and language.
“Poetry and humanity both need her lusty, never-give-up, never-stay-down spirit wrapped in masterfully executed poems.”
You can read the whole blessed thing here.
If the shirt fits…
(congratulations)