A Different Blaze
Description:... Fred Pelka's poems occupy poetry's narrow window, where words say what they mean and surprise at the same time. A Different Blaze takes on love, the fragility of being, war, and time, sidestepping sentimentality--but not heart, mixing darkness with humor. Pelka's voice is both direct and lyrical. "It is forbidden to walk on stilts in the snow-filled rooms of your imagination." Characters come alive; laughing Michael, in his souped-up power wheel chair; a German WW II soldier, awarded the Order of the Frozen Meat; a grandmother on her 100th birthday; a speech therapy student; a bank robber. These poems aren't afraid to address love, which might need "a wheelchair to waltz," or "a service dog to fetch the credit card receipt," but which serves to send us into "another ecstatically exuberant form of life."
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