In Not Untrue & Not Unkind, Martina Reisz Newberry embodies a compelling storytelling style reminiscent of of Robert Frost, the enigmatic brilliance of Emily Dickinson and the working class insights of the great singer-poet John Prine.
When she writes “ON THE FORECLOSURE OF THE ONLY HOUSE I EVER OWNED” she discovers that “in love's great stink and stammer, the seasons don't matter”
Christa Jones is a journalist for a major newswire service in Zurich, Switzerland. She holds a Ph.D. in French Language and Literature from Washington University. Her dissertation and recent publications focus on the topic of exile, nomadism, and identity in Maghrebian francophone women writers, in particular the works of Assia Djebar, Leïla Sebbar, and Malika Mokeddem.
It seems almost unbelievable in the world of 9/11, Bin Laden and the Clash of Civilisations, but the bestselling poet in the US in the 1990s was not any of the giants of American letters - Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens or Sylvia Plath; nor was it Shakespeare or Homer or Dante or any European poet. Instead, remarkably, it was a classically trained Muslim cleric who taught sharia law in a madrasa in what is now Turkey.
THE IMAGE OF THE POET, and the writer, and the artist, is firmly fixed in the public imagination. They represent all the values to which we most loyally adhere; they are deemed to embody the imperatives of sincerity and spontaneity, of integrity and dedication. Above all, they must be original. We hope and expect that the writers of our time will have something original to impart. We do not want them to repeat the maxims and precepts of the past. We do not want them to rehearse or follow the writings of their predecessors. There is a terrible fate in store for any writer accused of plagiarism. It is the cardinal sin of all contemporary writing