Toni Ortner’s chapbook, Focused Light from a Distant Star, is a collection of 39 ekphrastic poems and prose poems. Most were inspired by the works “created by women in the last two centuries,” says Ortner in her Preface including Natalya Goncharova, Frida Kahlo, Louise Nevelson, Helen Frankenthaler, and Kiki Smith. But men, too, are represented most notably with poems on Pieter Bruegel’s The Magpie on the Gallows and Storm at Sea, which concludes with the lines, “The heavy schooner founders in the waves/ We hear the sound of splintered wood and screams.”

—J. D. Solonche, author of 31 books of poetry and nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize

“The poet indulges useless subjective emotions” is what they said of Pasternak, who yet laid bare the soul of half a nation, and so does Toni Ortner who exhumes a rich heritage of half a culture of women artists.
“They are unknown but they lie in the rough basement,
For who else built the stubborn structure of language,
And rose against a silent melancholy and a dumb despair?”

In an age seemingly content to express itself with emotions, here are relics of the numinous beams and sinews focused from a different star; addressing, challenging, and recharging forgotten or marginalized batteries for the life of our times. This is the reportage of the soul for what we cannot express will oppress us.

—Phil Innes, publisher of Vermont Views Magazine

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