THE GATHERING by Morgan Baylog Finn

The surreal and real meld in The Gathering, a brilliant new chapbook by Morgan Finn, who was inspired by Pablo Picasso’s iconic painting Guernica. Poems in the first part dive into the ferocity and bizarre images of Hitler’s Luftwaffe bombing attack on defenseless women, children, the elderly, even animals in the field as they fled. Then Finn draws parallels with her own family’s shifting marital dilemmas and emotional struggles. Deft and energetic, this is a poignant, engrossing read.

–Geri Radacsi, author of My Oarsman (Antrim House), Soul and All That Jazz (Finishing Line Press), Ancient Music (Pecan Grove Press), Trapped in Amber (Connecticut River Press) and Tightrope Walker (Antrim House).

In “Guernica” Morgan Finn moves deeply, mysteriously, and beautifully from Picasso’s powerful painting of death, violence, horror, and fear to vivid portraits of her own family, stories told in distinct voices, the emotional terrain intricate and complex, a weave of fear, anger, loss, and, also, endurance, empathy, and sweet freedom.  A beautiful and moving work of “art.”

–Bernice Mennis, Professor Emerita of Literature and Writing, author of Holding It All (poetry); Breaking Out or Prison: a guide to consciousness, compassion, and freedom.

Morgan Baylog Finn’s poem, “Guernica,” a masterful ekphrastic on Picasso’s eponymous painting, is a stepping-off point for the rest of the finely crafted poems in this debut chapbook. Each poem is glossed with an epigraph quoting a line from that opening poem, a technique that successfully unites all 19 poems. Finn amuses us with lines like “It is never prudent to sleep lying down,” surprises us with “a grieved coloratura, / notes like snarled thread,” and disturbs us with “I yielded / till a girlhood psalm sang me, bawling, toward / light….” These are poems that make you think, laugh, cry, and drop your jaw.

–Jack Sheedy, author of the memoir Sting of the Heat Bug (Signalman Publishing, 2012) and The Wanting Place (poetry.)