tinderbox
Dale Winslow
About the Author
Dale Winslow has explored life as an interpretive naturalist, wildlife and fisheries biologist, teacher, editor, publisher, writer, photographer, and painter. She resides with her family on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and continues to be interested in pretty much everything.
She hopes one day to have her own microscope.
"Dale Winslow's Tinderbox shows a sure, mature touch with words and styles. Many of the poems herein blend symbolist style with contemporary rap: a rap without the theatrical ranting and bling. And from time to time one can hear or glimpse in the background an e.e. cummings, a John Skelton. Entertaining and thought-provoking.”
—Eric McLuhan, author of Electric Language, The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake, and co-author with Marshall McLuhan of Laws of Media, and Media and Formal Cause.
Paperback
ISBN 978-0-9855577-9-9
202 pages
$16.95
5.5"x8.5" perfect bound, paper
Hardcover
ISBN 978-0-9892018-2-7
202 pages
$24.95
5.5"x8.5" hardcover
Excerpts
Tinderbox
I ignite, like the drunkard’s match,
in exhausted alleyway at 2 a.m.
Ignite.
Burn my fingers on this fire
that strikes in hours deaf and blind.
I ignite, like winter kindling,
quickly and brightly as heavy scented cedar.
Ignite.
Rush of sap to open air, needle-rich,
heady release of earth and breath.
I burn, like birch bark,
written with welted words,
living pages of white set to flame,
these lines, smoke-signal reflections.
I burn,
and all that was, dissipates.
I burn, like ancient, peat bog fires,
memory, coiling and uncoiling,
a cryptic dance over moors.
I burn,
covering the moon with smoldering fingers.
I ignite.
I burn.
I ignite.
white noise from bukowski’s empty glass
begging in deviant pinned alleyways
the broken pastor weeps
for another hit
palms bleeding
licks sneers from passing sheep
backway motel hell
an overflowing ashtray
the model of past persuasion
oleander promises
traffic pale running
across the window
your eyes fixed
on the hollow left in the pillow
a holy ill-fated impression
of love’s forgotten scent
memory of taxi brakes
and jammed headlights, adulation
poor patron of abandoned breath
there are no miracles to wake the day
in the night, bread is broken
like the bones of a woman’s face
bruised blessings kissed
from a clenched fist
a religion that always
brings them to their knees
in tears
in sweat
in tongue
in cum
in blood
and splintered dreams
laughing Buddha
embraces the herds of dawn
and the world slouches carelessly
into forgotten corner bars
Reviews
“Dale Winslow’s tinderbox will ignite you. Her sensuous poems explode in an orgiastic word feast which communicates a waking dream convergence between women, nature, and truth. Winslow’s words hook you; you “reel them in real in them until you say O.” She conjures many varieties of “O” and “Oh” which encircle you within poetic sheer delight. Really!”
—Marleen S. Barr, author of Genre Fission, Lost in Space, Feminist Fabulation, and the novel, Oy Pioneer!
"A late evening's snifter of words - surprisingly ancient and very modern at the same time, personal and cosmic, even the typography dances - that gets to the deepest centers of your brain. Winslow is a welcome, major talent."
—Paul Levinson, author of The Plot to Save Socrates and Unburning Alexandria
"These poems track truth as though it were some constantly morphing mythical creature leaping from one disguise to another until it is caught and stilled in its final form—wisdom. They are euphonious, sensual, full of surprises and highly engaging. They present the reader with ample opportunities to “commit pleasure crimes against the dying world."
—Robert Priest, poet, novelist, playwright, songwriter, performer.
"No container of flammable miniatures but rather a smoldering verbal inferno, blazing with the heat & light of Dale Winslow’s unflinching yet passionate gaze on all things great and small, tinderbox addresses the most profound preoccupations of consciousness: love & loss, the natural & unnatural worlds (“broken temples of man”), &, most exquisitely perhaps, death (“the endangered void”). It should be no surprise, then, that to enter the world of tinderbox is to enter the world itself in all of its felt drama -- illuminated, lamented, & celebrated by the voice of this “white noise Orpheus,” a voice both incendiary & generative, “curling/coiling/as a snake/on fire.”
—Susan Lewis, poet, editor susanlewis.net