Blue Hydrangea by Virginia Lee Alcott

Cover Design: Virginia Lee Alcott

 

Virginia Lee Alcott’s poems have appeared in The Louisville Review, Workhorse Publishing Anthologies, and Moonstone Press, among others. She is a self-taught artist, photographer, writer, and Licensed Professional Art Therapist. She has recently had a chapter accepted for a book by Routledge on Photography and Mental Health, titled The Lens of Healing. Virginia was awarded a grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women to weave photography and poetry together focused on ending violence against women. Born in Philadelphia, PA, she has lived in Kentucky for over thirty years. She is the  mother of two daughters and grandmother to three precious grandchildren. @virginia.lee.1232

 

PRAISE:

 

The first time I read a poem by Virginia Alcott, I became a fan.  She has a talent for acute observation and avid detail cloaked in unique word choice, and her chapbook Blue Hydrangea highlights those skills. Through Alcott’s poetic eye, the reader is transported to a place where “the muse crevice/in the cave” exists and “aqua canning jars” are “drenched in years of secrets.”  In these poems, nature blooms and hovers and gushes those mysteries.  They captivate and haunt long after you stop reading.  I really appreciated the poems dedicated to Sallie Bingham.  She meant a lot to Kentucky.  Alcott’s Blue Hydrangea lights up “the sky of my heart.” Don’t miss this journey!

–Sylvia Ahrens (writing as Allison Thorpe), author of A Girl, Her Slipper, and Yesterday’s Rainbow, American Book Fest Chapbook Award Winner for 2025

 

Virginia Lee Alcott’s Blue Hydrangea is a gorgeous patchwork of memories and musings filled with rich images of nature and told in a gentle welcoming tone that wraps around you like a well-loved quilt as you enjoy a cool spring evening on the porch. Love, loss, parenting, nature and the drive to create are explored in poems that turn the everyday into the extraordinary.

–Ellen Birkett Morris, Author of Beware the Tall Grass: A Novel, Lost Girls: Short Stories and two poetry chapbooks, Abide and Surrender