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Book Cover for: Warped Passage: poems and paintings, Cheryl and Janet Snell

Warped Passage: poems and paintings

Cheryl and Janet Snell

"...her memories insist they are still there/like a mirage rippling on the horizon/a slow bell tolling." From the first realization that something was wrong, sisters Cheryl and Janet Snell set out to look Fate in the eye and chronicle their mother's battle with Alzheimer's.Warped Passage is dedicated to her. The slim collection has its own kind of beauty, alternating short poems with expressionistic paintings that make the central image succinct, whether it's showing the beauty in craquelure skin, or the tremble of "Mother Forgets Church." As the sisters pressed on through all the stages of Alzheimer's with their mother, they wondered "What will take her out of the night/and into the blind spot/ she mistakes for the sun?" The clock had its own agenda, but before she left, she left them with this, her one memory persisting: "...but even as her children fell away/ she brought the photos closer/ to touch the only face not forgotten./Oh, darling, she said, stroking his grainy cheek.// (Wife)

Book Details

  • Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
  • Publish Date: Dec 16th, 2013
  • Pages: 36
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.00in - 6.00in - 0.09in - 0.18lb
  • EAN: 9781452825694
  • Categories: GeneralDiseases & Conditions - Alzheimer's & Dementia

About the Author

Cheryl Snell is the author of Prisoner's Dilemma (Lopside Press Chapbook Competition winner, 2009) and five other collections of poetry. Her most recent novel is Shiva's Arms (Writer's Lair Books 2010), and her poetry has appeared in many online and print journals, lately in The Curator, Olentangy Review, PANK, egg, Deep Water Literary Journal, and Mixitini Matrix. She has had work chosen for a Best of the Net Anthology and, more recently, for The Centrifugal Eye's Fifth Anniversary Anthology. Her new chapbook of poems, Live through This will be published in 2014. Cheryl lives in the Maryland suburbs of Washington DC with her husband, where she plays a mean classical piano. Janet Snell is a magna cum laude graduate of the Maryland Institute, College of Art, where she studied painting with the late Edward Dugmore. She has been included in many group and solo shows, including New York's Drawing Center, Washington's Strathmore Hall, Cleveland's Spaces, and Akron's Summit Art Space. The author of FLYTRAP (Cleveland Poetry Center 1990) and an E-chapbook, HEADS (March Street Press 1998), and one of her collections with Cheryl Snell, PRISONER'S DILEMMA, won the Lopside Press Chapbook Contest. Snell regularly publishes in the small magazines, recently in Mixitini Matrix, Red Fez, PANK, and Big Bridge, and she paints semi-realistic portraits on commission.