Laureen Summers, a woman with Cerebral Palsy, has been writing poetry since the 1960’s. Her poems reaffirm her story amidst a life of challenge, determination and love. Contender of Chaos, published by Finishing Line Press in 2020 was her first chapbook of poetry. Her poems have been published in the Symbolist, Old Friends, The Mid-Atlantic Review and WordsGathering. Summers lives with her husband of 50 years in Silver Spring, Maryland. They have a wonderful daughter and son-in-law, and two grandchildren.
PRAISE:
These deeply interior poems are centered in the world we most often pass through, though taking little notice — Laureen Summers does, over and over again. “The waters are dark and deep / reflecting somber trees,” she writes in “Prelude” “My soul touches the wind / as I feel my thoughts / blend with shadows of new awareness.” Reflective as these poems are, they are often set outdoors among gardens, paths, trees, sun, rain, the seasons — spring, summer, autumn, winter— walking solo or with friends, thinking of those who have meant so much to her. Never far is Laureen’s disability: “Is there any reason / an elderly disabled woman / cannot feel beautiful,” she writes, in “Just Another Day.” And in a self-defining poem, “I am the girl who walks funny and whose speech is sometimes hard to understand/ I am the girl who people .move out of the way for.” The poems of Dancing to the Moon bring us into a poetic sensibility of radiant awareness, inner and outer: “The fireflies appear late at night, she writes in “The Rain Garden”: “The few passersby don’t seem to notice// the moment’s loveliness, the busy fireflies / or their own tall shadows in the moonlight.”
–Merrill Leffler, author of Mark the Music
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