Article in The Herald here

Sleep Before Evening by Magdalena Ball

Marianne is teetering at the edge of reason.

A death in the family sends her brilliant academic career and promising future spiraling out of control until resentment towards those who shaped her past leads her on a wild and desperate search for the truth about herself.

On the seedy side of New York, she meets Miles, a hip musician busking the streets and playing low-rent venues in a muddled bid to make his own dreams come true.

In her new life, she finds anarchic squalor, home grown music and poetry, booze, drugs, sex, violence, love, loss … and, above all, exhilarating freedom on her troubled journey from sleep to awakening.

This gritty, relentless story unfolds with the same cool detachment that motivates the central character to peel back the layers of her life and expose the painful scalding within.

Read an excerpt. Watch the Book Trailer. Listen to Magdalena Ball reading an excerpt

ISBN: 978-1-904492-96-2

Exploring a new voice is at first alienating. A reader looks for clues. In poetry the difficulties are greater than prose, not because poetry is harder, but because it uses modes of explication that are individual, sometimes idiosyncratic. Magdalena Ball here appears at full length, no longer the figure behind a beguiling chapbook or the collaborator with other poets. The result is explosive.

The voice is the same but it is more insistent and the reader responds to what was already known but never before shown to such advantage. In poetry the thin line that divides the hermetic from the obvious is dangerous ground and not all poets can tread there without destruction. Maggie is comfortable here and not only treads but dances.

There is everywhere a kernel of hard reality at work. It often works deep below the surface but it is always there - a relationship that has slipped from the ideal, a scientific fact that is a capsule for experience, an event of intense resonance. Although she is a skilled writer of prose, her poems show a different sensibility. Her concern is with the details that support our experience but which we pass over. To bring these to our attention is an act of originality and it requires an obliquity of approach. What marvelous events are these that we never see and how clever she is to bring them before us.

In certain backward areas and circles uninformed bullies have put forward stupid legislation in an effort to coerce the general population. Here is the opening of her poem on recent events in Texas and the efforts to impose creationism on the Texas schools.

Pollyanna wants good intentions
calls separation of church and state
sacred
there's an irony
twisting words
down the sugar chute.

How she avoids the journalistic! She has lifted the acts of fools to a level of art that enhances effectiveness. She finds unexpected centers and from them can be just as deadly and accurate as the most Swiftian satire.

To talk about poetry is as hard as - meaningfully - to talk about music. There is no substitute for the thing itself. Here is a sample, THE VISIBLE SPECTRUM:

A waving giant of flotsam
ducking and bowing
white light broken to spectral colours
my hand opens, grasps, and opens through you
empty
fingers wide, then closes again
blinking desire

Read an excerpt.

ISBN: 978-1-906609-30-6