Diane Klammer is a disabled writer, singer-songwriter, retired therapist, and biology teacher. Her work has appeared in the United States and Canada, England, Scotland, Wales, and Australia. She has appeared in Lummox, Avocet, Open Earth Eco Poems, Rattle, Spaces, and elsewhere, forthcoming in Syncopation Review and Blank Slate Review. She strives to write from a place of humor and compassion and is grateful for diverse voices of poetry in books music and film.
PRAISE:
In Diane Klammer’s poems, the twenty-first century American body attempts to contain the beauty of everyday life across a veil of physical pain that aches in tandem with our environment. It is in the very human need to address the spiritual contradictions of being alive, even as “every cell has been stung”, that Klammer’s poetry spills over into crow language, poems that stellate across the page, or weave contrapuntally. In the wise acknowledgment of a cosmic question that can never be answered, but must be carried as a personal quest, Nonlinear Healing weaves a rich tapestry of art, language, and holy confession.
–Majda Gama, author of the Call of Paradise and In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls
Diane Klammer brings a poet’s heart to an education in biology and ecology. She bridges and threads these through the experience of her own health challenges. The result? Beautiful poems that surprise and delight. Klammer evokes the natural landscape on an understanding of the science, that sees both the beauty and the pain. A rainbow of birds and flowers bring solace as vaccines bite, bees sting and steps are measured against pain. Sometimes the brutal reality of nature is rendered through her own body – sciatica, spinal surgery, bell’s palsy, long covid all dance with herons, swim among the glistening stars and “seek for clearer understanding of the watermark of our own existence.” These poems exemplify the nonlinear nature of experience, learning and healing. They spiral, they weave, and they will call you back again and again. The illustrations, painted by Klammer and Roger, her husband, evoke the spirit of the poems and add joyful bursts of color.
–Tasha Lowe works in arts journalism, CNF, graphic novels, screenwriting, and speculative fiction. Current comics related work can be found at SOLRAD and The Comics Journal.
This is a breathtakingly magnificent chapbook of superbly crafted poetry and vibrantly original artwork. Diane Klammer takes us on a journey of healing where stars are “a negation of shadow showering a moonless trail,” and yet “messages to the milky way.” There is such vastness here, such hard-earned peace in a world of wracking pain and breathtaking beauty. She finds a balance and peace beyond linear thought and understanding. “Maybe it’s birdsong,” she says, “as to own a bird, one must live in a house of glass walls.” These are words and visions that illuminate our time.
–Jared Smith, author of A Sphere Encased in Fires and Life
Wendy S (verified owner) –
“There is wisdom in trying to answer impossible questions,” writes Diane Klammer in Nonlinear Healing, a chapbook exploring illness and climate change. Using imagery from nature and scientific observation, the poems guide the reader into the worlds of ponds, fields, and skies. Like ailing human bodies, these are fragile yet resilient environments where often overlooked life thrives: “every second counts, . . . /sings the meadowlark, says the beating of your heart . . .” A celebration of beauty and seemingly impossible challenge, these poems illuminate the spirit, not like July Fourth fireworks, but tenderly, like fireflies, “micro-candles” on a moonless, mid-
summer night.