Author: Stacy Lynn Mar

Genre:  Poetry

Book:

Mannequin Rivalry

Deeper Than Pink

Anonymous Confessions

Conversing in a Black Cadillac

Bio

Stacy Lynn Mar is a confessional poet and a life coach who emphasizes the concepts of positive psychology and writing as a basis for her therapeutic approach.    Some of her poetic idols include Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, Charles Bukowski, and Erica Jong.   Stacy lives a life rich in Buddhist philosophy, is a practicing Yogi, and dabbles in digital art when life permits.  She divides her time between family, home-schooling her daughter, and a rich intellectual life devout of arts, literature, the silver screen, ice cream, indie music, and vintage things.  She’s described herself as a psychology nerd and a professed bibliophile.

Author Accomplishments

Stacy has authored four collections of poetry and a collection of poetry-writing prompts.   She has had hundreds of poems widely published in over 50 small & independent press magazines, webzines, and journals.   She has been nominated numerous times for Best of the Web & the Pushcart Prize.  

Stacy is Editor & Founder for the online women’s literary & development webzine Pink.Girl.Ink. Press. She also is masthead of a Gothic Romance Reviews, where she reviews novels and hosts author interviews of the genre.  

Stacy graduated from Lindsey Wilson College with her BA in Counseling Studies, she earned her MA in Mental Health Counseling & her Addiction/Professional Counseling Certification from Capella University.   She also attended Ellis College for undergraduate studies in English Literature.  

Blurb

Feminist, poet, teacher, and scholar…Stacy is as bold and witty as she ever was in this fourth installment. Yet again, she has masterfully orchestrated a confessional collection of poetry resurrected from the gritty observations of everyday life.

Her accounts of love, loss, suffering, and the beautiful agility of the human spirit have been well-crafted from front-seat observations and five a.m. coffee sessions.

Stacy has a remarkable sense for detail and a dramatic, unique skill for wrapping the ‘everyday’ into metaphorical sentiments. She masters this gift in the poem ‘Mountain Parkway’ as she remembers an old love and simultaneously pays homage to her homeland:

Excerpts

“The summer is passing

Like a long arm swaying

From the passenger seat

Of a car on a four-lane highway.

And I ride alongside you

Like a virtue, a wild nag

That grinds my eyesight

To the moon-ground recollections

Of dreams that buzzed in June

Now as splintered as rosewood

And littered of memories

That irk my nervous hands

Like a nose itch that won’t wipe away.”

What Readers Are Saying

“Her raw, metaphorical take on life and relationships reminds me of a younger, softer version of Sharon Olds.”

-Tammi Watts, Educator from Wisconsin

“Once she pulls you in, it’s impossible not to complete a poem. Her words read as sentimental, metaphorical eulogies to everyday life. I can’t read a book by Mar without pausing to pay thanks to even the experience of the mundane.”

-Jennifer, Blog Writer and educator of Culinary Arts, from New Jersey

“Remarkable would be a bland understatement. This young poet is as intelligent and creative as she is touching and heart-rending. She adores life, she embraces it’s scars…”

-Shelley Wright, Mixed Media artist from Brittish Columbia

“She is a woman warrior with a brilliant insight. How can you not appreciate that?”

-Felicia, Student and Writer, from Kentucky

“Her metaphors and symbolism are absolutely breath-taking! Pick this book up, you will not regret the words that await you from this Indie author!”

-Elizabeth Ward, Educator, from Canada

“This is real poetry. This is individualism in it’s raw aura. These words are life, themselves.”

-Erica, Student, Nigeria

BOOK EXCERPT

Only The Young Have Such Moments

The girl is leaning close to the boys face,

Is telling him why objects lost from

The soft hands of strangers

Are really heirlooms disguised as garbage.

She holds a matchbox toward his face,

Delicately, the cardboard glowing

Of acrylic paint and super-glued lace.

Tells him it’s a concubine for one lonely heart,

The slippery paper taped to the corner

Once held a doughnut which touched

The lips of a young boy’s first kiss.

She says she likes to paste and rearrange

otherwise insignificant pieces of people’s lives,

The smell of Japanese take-out

On the sixth Sabbath, fortunes unsnapped

From cookies and still smelling of sugar.

Says she is stealing memories,

Making those lost,  semi-witnessed moments

Immortal in their own rights.

He listens, one eye trained against the sky,

Sinking beneath the dark holes

The stars form in their broken constellations.

He is dreaming of their first kiss

And how she might savor it,

All the while she’s recalling the strange smile

Of John Lennon on the cover of a vintage record,

Wondering how she can illuminate

The vinyl in a decoupage-styled collage

without losing the infinite kiss of Yoko Ono.

Pizza Talk and English Beer

On the eve of a holiday

I cannot fully remember

I came to you

Like a drunkard on the mend,

Stiff in my winter boots,

The smell of front porch

on my hair.

I’m not sure what I expected

But you were two thumbs deep

In some foreign documentary

So we spread cold pizza

And Old English beer between us

And talked sleepy circles

Around mad prophets,

The historical poets of our time

And each syllable you spoke

Felt like the edge of another world

I could cross, except

The alcohol was stealing my thunder

So all I could manage

Was a 2am rant about

The binds this world born us into,

The unjust in our lack of choice,

The wondering eyeball of chance,

And the God in all our words;

How always Saturday night

Would find us waging wars

Against the invisible forces

Of our universe and how

Come Sunday morning

There’s always more questions

Than there are answers.

How, exhausted, we fall asleep

Across the bent in arms of each other,

Aging as we sleep

Like old dogs waiting to die.

The Piano Player

He said

Spring always reminded him

Of silk dresses,

rims of their sewn edges

Hugging the breeze

Like petals mending

Their strong, poetic skeletons

In the aftermath of winter.

We’d spy

The first flight of a butterfly

On a porch swing

In the country.

Tin trailer and a horizon

Of black-shingle roof

To shed us from the sun.

Two ice teas between us,

We’d talk of books,

The stiff voice of Yeats,

The sheets where Sexton slept,

And like a traveler mid-stop,

He’d bring his melodies to me.

I’d ride the baritone waves

Of his old love songs,

His tan skin and hand joints,

all open-throat and thrashing keys.

And when his fingers paused mid-play,

I’d pray he still had

Something left to say to me.

Vintage Runaway

Love was a church hymn

she couldn’t sing without choking.

Outgrowing the trees of her homelands’ hills,

The rooms that bore her grandmothers babies,

Mountain air becoming the spit spew

Of a stifled star shower beneath the lunar moon.

Then the bare, brown clapboarded rooms,

Bright of tiny square windows

Where she’d gaze like a prisoner

Across uncalculated miles of rolling green,

Strength of the dogwood set afire by the sun,

Weeping tendrils of the willows bowing forward,

Waving their bony, green fingers as if inviting

Her to walk along dust hollows, barefoot,

To drop her threadbare white dress

Into the ocean of a puddle alongside

This make-shift highway leading south.

To throw her head back,

Shake the wild curls of her hair,

The feet of each pale strand

Itching to dance between the fingers

Of so many strange boys.

Connect With Stacy

Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/MaRandaStacie

Personal Blog http://warningthestars.blogspot.com/

Pink.Girl.Ink. Press http://pinkgirlink.blogspot.com/

Gothic Romance Reviews http://gothicromancereviews.blogspot.com/

Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7626066.Stacy_Lynn_Mar