Birds Like Me - Softcover

Cooper, Joan Drescher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1646620496 ISBN 13: 9781646620494

Publisher: Finishing Line Press, 2019

Synopsis

Birds Like Me collects odd moments of clarity found on dog walks and long drives, while working with students, and even while shopping for groceries. Like snapshots from a working mother’s life, the poems spring from conversations, fragments of memory, sudden lightning strokes of ideas, or snippets from longer stories. Maryland’s Eastern Shore offers the settings of Assateague Island, sleepy rivers, country roads, the Chesapeake Bay, and Ocean City’s inlet. Bared to full exposure, poetry also hides in the shadows waiting for release. Each piece is all truth and utter lies.

About this title

About the Author

Joan Drescher Cooper is a teacher and writer living on Maryland's Eastern Shore. A twenty-eight-year veteran of Maryland public schools, she enjoys the drama and energy of her students. Long-time advisor for Poetry Out Loud, she regularly attends the biennial Dodge Poetry Festival. She was awarded the 2018 Light of Literacy Award for teaching by the Wicomico County Library Association for conducting an afterschool writing program, bringing live Shakespeare plays to students, and publishing a school creative writing magazine. She teaches English Language Arts Grade 6-12 and coordinates the Career Research and Development I course with Work-based Learning I for Wicomico Evening High and Secondary Summer School. She distills the joy that living on the Eastern Shore delivers in Birds Like Me, a collection of intuitive moments stolen from dog walks, teaching, and dreaming. Moving to the Eastern Shore from Baltimore in 2006 spurred poetry, short stories, and fifteen novels. Short pieces have been published in online magazines such as Pandemonium Press' Doorknobs & BodyPaint. From 2014-2016, Joan published a novel series set on a West Virginia mountain, Finding Home on Lilac Hill, a short story collection, Return to Lilac Hill, and the novel, Lilac Hill Folly. Joan is co-founder and treasurer for the Berlin Chapter of the Maryland Writer's Association, as well as member of the Eastern Shore Writer's Association. She is one of the Rabbit Gnaw Writers-a collaborative writing critique group sponsored by the Delmarva Review. Joan and her husband Tim have three children and five grandchildren. Her dog Hopper walks her daily.

Review

In this impressive debut collection of poems, Birds Like Me, novelist Joan Drescher Cooper proves to be as adept in verse as she is in prose. Cooper’s musical lyrics arise from the narrative ground to transcend the daily quotidian as gracefully as Shakespeare’s lark ...arising/From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate...

–Nancy Mitchell– recipient of a Pushcart Prize in Poetry, author of The Near Surround, Grief Hut and The Out-of-Body Shop

 

Joan Drescher Cooper is a compassionate wise woman whose collision with family dynamics explodes off the page with an insistent search for meaning. She teaches us to respect the comings and goings of our daily drills. If poetry is about turning the physical into the metaphysical, she has the knack. In the very first poem, I loved the line – “Night sweeps color into its pocket.”

–Gerald Sweeney—reviewer and author of the The Columbiad series including Comes the Electric Circus, Eagles Rising, First Lights, Crashing into Sunrise, A Tournament of a Distinguished White Order, Yo Columbia! and Wizard Ho!

 

About this edition

• Publisher: Finishing Line Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1646620496
• ISBN 13: 9781646620494
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 86