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The Fool Sings
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Photo: Lynne Barrett
Weslea Sidon speaking at the Southwest Harbor Public Library. For information on future events, see our events page.
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The Fool Sings by Weslea Sidon
Advance Praise for The Fool Sings
These poems are plainspoken but they do not settle for easy answers; they are smart and sometimes deliciously snarky, but always looking past smartness towards real wisdom; they are in the language we really speak, yet apt at any moment to break into song; capable of cutting you off at the knees, yet (usually) letting you instead walk gloriously free. These poems are real. They can almost teach you how to live, and certainly can show you—at times, shockingly clearly—how you are already living. --Christian Barter, author of In Someone Else’s House and The Singers I Prefer Weslea Sidon’s poems are in two places at once: they shift yet cling, observe yet participate. Again and again Sidon transposes the quotidian and the tragic. In “Useful Information,” she transforms standard charts of information into a map of loss. In “Blueberry Time,” her omniscient eye moves among a handful of characters, revealing their botched assumptions and expectations—tenderly, ironically, ruthlessly. She doesn’t take sides, but neither does she avoid them. The patient cadence of these poems is a mark, I think, of how loath the poet is to draw a final conclusion. At the same time her perceptions are subtle and exact, drawing me inexorably into her quiet, terrible, beautiful landscapes. “There is nothing else,” she writes: “A gust, a drift, unfettered snow; / ice bound stairs as insurmountable as glaciers / and a door / beyond a solid sea.” --Dawn Potter, author of Same Old Story and editor of A Poet’s Sourcebook 
Photo: Curtis Wells
About Weslea Sidon
Weslea Sidon’s poems have appeared in Confrontations, Salonika, Gulf Stream Magazine, the New York Times Metropolitan Diary, Xanadu, Still On the Island, and Paumanok, among other journals and anthologies. She has been Arts Editor of The Women’s Record, a regular columnist for Face Magazine and The Squash, and has reviewed music and books for The Bar Harbor Times, the Mount Desert Islander, Off the Coast, and High Performance Magazine. A recipient of a Martin Dibner Fellowship in Poetry and a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, she teaches creative writing at Summer Festival of the Arts on Mount Desert Island, where she lives with her husband and cats. Weslea Sidon's Find Maine Writers profile is here. |
