From her first poem in Games of Transformation, Alice M. Azure draws the reader into another world, one steeped in history and immersed in shadows of an ancient culture that can only be intuited. She pulls us deep into this lost world and sets us down in the midst of “eight-rowed corn, mica, Ramey pots, river trade routes,” and stains buried deep in the soil of Cahokia Mounds. This is poetry in its truest form.

Alice’s words create long strings of scenes, which capture the reader’s imagination. Step for step, we journey with her as she hikes the perimeters of old burial mounds, and delves into archives and exhibits on display at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site.* Of the original 120 mounds, less than 80 remain in the Cahokia location, which holds the distinction of being designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations in 1982. (more…)

1.       Please introduce yourself and your poetry.

I was born in North Adams, Massachusetts as Alice May Hatfield.  My father was of Acadian (French and Mi’kmaw Métis) and Dutch heritage and grew up in the southern part of Nova Scotia, Canada.  My mother was born in West Springfield, Massachusetts but spent her formative years in Mandal, Norway—the southern tip of that country, right on the sea.  Her second language was Norwegian.  They were married in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts.  After World War II when they divorced, my sisters, brother and I were sent to a children’s home in Cromwell, Connecticut. (more…)

In The Secret Life of Pronouns, What Our Words Say About Us, James W. Pennebaker, a renowned psychologist, uses complex computer programming, which he helped develop, to explore the use of pronouns, articles, prepositions, and positive and negative emotion words. He writes about the complex interplay between who we are and the words we choose. (more…)

“Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss” by Joel Fuhrman is compelling and convincing nonfiction. You are of course what you eat and if you eat chemicals, sugar, and a billion potatoes, you aren’t going to be healthy and you will likely be fat. Fuhrman writes with passion and zeal, and I found many of his points to be bitingly humorous. (more…)

In The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, Diane Ravitch provides a comprehensive, incisive, and fervent critique of the current decades long No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top reform movements.

Ravitch produces conclusive data to support her transformation from an early supporter of test-based teacher accountability and the trend toward privatization of public schools to becoming a fervent critic and an advocate for education professionals. Her support for the No Child Left Behind Act gives her the unique perspective of someone who know and understands the good intentions and laudable goals of this crop of education reformers. Her career as a education historian makes her uniquely qualified to put this movement into perspective. Having seen NCLB fully implemented, she understands the negative impact of simplistic top-down bottom-line business models. With standardized tests as their underpinning, teaching becomes data collection. While the teacher is collecting the data, the student is learning to take tests. (more…)