A Dance Around the Cauldron

$15.00

ISBN 978-0-9984580-3-8
FORMAT: 5.5 X 8.5 inches; Perfect Bound
36 pgs

By Linda Lerner and Donna Joy Kerness

Between 1692—93 twenty people were accused of being witches and executed in Salem Massachusetts. Nineteen were hanged on Gallows Hill, and one elderly man was pressed to death by heavy stones after he wouldn’t enter a plea. Several others died in jail.

My purpose in this collection is not to retell what happened, which is widely known, or to give an account of Arthur Miller’s powerful, play, The Crucible. Instead, I’ve chosen to use his technique and blend characters together with people we know living among us.

What is going on now in this country makes it especially poignant for me, but to restrict it to that, is also too limiting. I see the situation as something ongoing, barely noticeable, until an accumulation of incidents makes it impossible to ignore, its darkness sweeps down on us, and we have no choice but to rise up and confront it.

400 years is next door, across the street, the place where you live and work; it is the distance between one neighbor and another. The village was called Salem then. Its villagers walk among us; they act like us. We do not recognize them. We prefer not to. — from Linda Lerner’s introduction

Watch Linda read from this book here.

Description

Linda Lerners collection, Yes, the Ducks Were Real, was published by NYQ Books (Feb. 2015) as was her previous full-length collection, Takes Guts and Years Sometimes. A chapbook of poems inspired by nursery rhymes, illustrated by Donna Kerness, Ding Dong the Bell Pussy in the Well (Lummox Press, Feb. 2014.) She’s been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize. In 1995 she and Andrew Gettler began Poets on the Line, the first poetry anthology on the Net for which she received two grants. In Spring, 2015 she read six poems on WBAI for Arts Express.

Donna Joy Kerness has been producing Art of various mediums over the years. Her inspirations have emerged from her past… She was a Dancer at The Henry Street Playhouse with Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis, a casual fellow poet and friend of Linda Lerner, and an Underground Cinema Super Star in the movies of the Kuchar Brothers, during the Sixties in New York. After relocating to San Antonio and raising a family, now working with sketching , drawing and painting and multimedia Art which has been exhibited at the Highwire Gallery and the Candlelight Cafe, in San Antonio,Texas. Donna also did the Art work for Ding Dong the Bell, Pussy in the Well, by Linda Lerner, which was published by Lummox Press in 2014.

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