The Blind Lifeguard by Katrin Talbot

$13.99

 

Katrin Talbot‘s poems constantly delight and amaze, reveling in the sounds and mouthfeel of words that lead us to secret trapdoors where the plain surface of the everyday suddenly falls away. Like her swimming strokes, the strokes of her pen are full of flutter kicks and flip turns. Give yourself up to the whirlpool of her “cartwheel mind” and savor her uniquely whimsical yet deadly serious playfulness.

–TIMOTHY WALSH, Ph.D., author of When the World Was Real-Wheel Drive: New Jersey Poems (Main Street Rag Publishing Co.)

 

A brief description of a new poetry collection—even an extraordinary one like The Blind Lifeguard—will only rarely include the word “profound.” But Katrin Talbot’s latest is worthy of all the superlatives I can muster. These are wellwrought poems—some of them almost literally glistening with watery images, others spilling over with love and hope and, yes, humor. They provide the reader with hard evidence that a gifted musician like Talbot can also display rare virtuosity in poetry—enough to make you feel like a frog on a bicycle. (Read the collection to find out what that means!)

–Marilyn L. Taylor, Ph.D., Wisconsin Poet Laureate Emerita, Author of Step on a Crack, (Kelsay Books)

 

 

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The Blind Lifeguard

by Katrin Talbot

$13.99, paper

978-1-63534-974-0

2019

Australian-born Katrin Talbot’s collection The Blind Lifeguard was recently released by Finishing Line Press. She has four other chapbooks, including noun’d, verb and The Little Red Poem, from dancing girl press, Freeze-Dried Love from Finishing Line Press, and St. Cecilia’s Daze, published by Parallel Press. She has recently been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes in Poetry and was voted Madison Magazine’s Best of 2015 Spoken Word Artist/Poet.

Her poetry and photography collaborations have included multi-media classical music concerts performed in New York City, Australia, and Romania, among many, a Madison Symphony photography and poetry exhibit, a residency as poet for the Sound Ensemble Wisconsin chamber music group, involving responsive poetry to the pieces performed, the creation of audience poems based on the themes of the concerts, a poetry/music workshop with inmates at the Oakhill Correctional Facility.

She has also collaborated twice with Chef Daniel Bonanno of Pig in a Fur Coat, and Mary Theodore of Sound Ensemble Wisconsin to combine original poetry with Bonanno’s menu and Theodore’s music selections to produce a performance combining all three, with a six course meal served.

She runs the Bridge Poetry Series in collaboration with the Chazen Museum of Art in which poets respond to traveling exhibits. Ms. Talbot worked last year with the Madison Symphony Orchestra, in which she plays assistant principle viola, to produce the Counterpoint Readings, in which poets responded to a selected symphonic piece. Recently, she worked with the symphony and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art to produce a performance in the Museum in which a quartet performed a program inspired by the work of Do Ho Suh and poets presented original poems responding to his luminous installation.

A song cycle based on her poetry was premiered in Toronto a few years ago. She also has done Instant Poetry as an event for the Reedsburg ArtsCrawl and the event Municipal, in which people select words from baskets or give her a brief story and she will type a poem. She once received prize money from a national poetry contest to fund a Dairy Queen run. So much of our lives can be poems, and she is always armed with a pencil.

 

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