Cooked Oranges Poems

Poetic inspiration continues to be a mystery to me, but I am its deep advocate, and hold to its irrational and shady acreage like a greedy real estate developer gazing out over the possibilities (a ramshackle hut here, a barn there, a castle with a lake yonder...). Is it angels, djinn, my black cat curled at the bottom of my bed while I'm hot in composition mode? My "unconscious," "God Consciousness?" (my fervent prayer).

When Framboise Simon returns to a small village on the banks of the Loire, the locals do not recognize her as the daughter of the infamous woman they hold responsible for a tragedy during the German occupation years ago. But the past and present are inextricably entwined, particularly in a scrapbook of recipes and memories that Framboise has inherited from her mother. And soon Framboise will realize that the journal also contains the key to the tragedy that indelibly marked that summer of her ninth year. . . .

KNOCKING FROM INSIDE, BY TIEL AISHA ANSARI, is the journey of the human soul towards the Divine approached through a number of doorways: sorrow, the natural world, and the listening heart. We travel through both real and illusionary lands to (re)join the Beloved at the end of all paths. "When Tiel says 'God' she means it, in all her various ways and fresh poetic stratagems, in these poems in which there are many strata, and in this book which contains many gems." - Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore

Somehow the resonance for me during the entertaining of this title as an abiding albeit background theme for the poems, was the perfect crime of our existence: perfect because created by a perfect Creator. A crime because we get up to such malfeasance all the time, at the lower end of it, and a crime at the higher end in the sense that the Sufis often mention, that any existence of theirs before Allah ta'ala, any flake or residue of their self-ness, is a crime, a flaw, an obstruction before the Light of God. Only when you have known a saint (wali) of whatever spiritual practice do you the sense of a personality honed to its finest before the divine consciousness, whose actions and words and thoughts are soaked in divinity to such a degree that the person is truly human in its essence and effaced before God in His ever-present and infinitely Merciful activity.

A literary cookbook that celebrates food and poetry, two of life's essential ingredients. In the same way that salt seasons ingredients to bring out their flavors, poetry seasons our lives; when celebrated together, our everyday moments and meals are richer and more meaningful. The twenty-five inspiring poems in this book—from such poets as Marge Piercy, Louise Glück, Mark Strand, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Jane Hirshfield—are accompanied by seventy-five recipes that bring the richness of words to life in our kitchen, on our plate, and through our palate. Eat This Poem opens us up to fresh ways of accessing poetry and lends new meaning to the foods we cook.

Sufi poems from the love-ocean, washing at the shores of this world and the next, with God willing a depth charge or two to find new love grottos, new heights in underwater drownings, new depths in aerial flights. Contradictions? As Walt Whitman said, "Do I contradict myself? Yes, I contradict myself! I contain multitudes." And if we rub the self to its tissue-thin reality, God's Light shines more thoroughly through.

A grand outgoing, heading directly into the puzzlement, the puzzle, puzzling it all out... Poems of search and devotion to the One, through labyrinthine manifestations... self and its various sheddings.

There are among us luminous beings who maintain that what we might taste of the Garden of Paradise and what we might suffer of the Fire of Hell is right here in our present earthly and mortal existence as well. The imaginal truth of the Spiritual Path that points to the Next World after death is perhaps indisputable (however some might vigorously dispute it) but our lives, upon reflection, sometimes thrown overboard and barely making it to shore, sometimes buoyed up very high and slammed down very low and hard, are a living proof of the this-world tasting of the Next World experience...