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Unfinished Projects
poems by Alice Osborn
ISBN: 978-1-59948-270-5, 44 pages
$10
Order from website: http://www.mainstreetrag.com/AOsborn.html
Alice Osborn convincingly shows us how a narrative poet can expertly craft in rich detail and with the occasional dry wit scenes of family tranquility against the contrasting darkness of a suicidal mother whose "love and loathing" she cannot "patch" like silver aircraft skin and, as a child, whose "hand she never holds." But especially poignant, in a different vein, is the poem "Challenger 7," in which the tragedy, both national and personal, is elevated to a cosmic/spiritual domain where the Pleiades mourn the tragedy in the astronauts' own "living room!" There are many scenes in this most intimate collection that will live long with the reader.
--David T. Manning
How easy and pleasing to sink down into the settings of Alice Osborn's narrative poems. From childhood to motherhood, sights and sounds of relationships, kitchens, children, varied male characters, a French mother-every poem a surprise menu item as she mixes commonplace with complexity. Often, her poems tantalize with the suggestions of more to come in detailing a relationship or situation. There is honesty in all these poems, an affinity that readers can appreciate and associate within their own realms of life experiences.
--Sara Claytor
Reading the first poems in this collection, you note how Alice Osborn collects precise facts, then applies imagination and technique to give them newer, stronger meaning. When she deals with the daily-standing in the K-Mart Line, remembering azaleas, wearing a blue wool coat-nothing seems merely daily. Everything from sipping coffee (" the nectar / without a god to call your own") to Myrtle Beach (": the land of hemp necklaces, tongue piercings... Marilyn blonde hair,") becomes new again in her often wry, always honest vision.
--Sally Buckner
Born in Washington D.C. the winter after Watergate to a French mother and a civil servant father, Alice Osborn came of age in Charleston and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. In the Lowcountry she learned how to hoist a spinnaker, stop a shoplifter and complete two marathons. She is a graduate of Virginia Tech and North Carolina State who served as an ROTC cadet, waitress, retail manager and high school teacher. Osborn uses all of her experiences now as an instigator of writing happenings and as a creative writing teacher to students ages 9-90. Her work appears in Raleigh's News and Observer, The Pedestal Magazine, and in numerous journals and anthologies. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her husband and two children. Website: www.aliceosborn.com.
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