Below is a review of my poetry book Folk Concert: Changing Times.
“In Brief” review of Folk Concert: Changing Times by Kristin Hutchins published in Women’s Studies 41.8 (November 2012): 1010-11.
Heller, Janet Ruth. Folk Concert: Changing Times. Cochran, GA: Anaphora Literary Press, 2012.
In her most recent collection of past and present poems, Folk Concert: Changing Times, Janet Ruth Heller combines the voices she plucks from both different decades and various parts of nature to celebrate both speech and song, especially in times of rebellion. Be it from the mouth of a woman, child, parent, or songbird, these poems are an homage to the discovery and preservation of identity awareness—political, professional, self, social, familial—a knowledge tightly wrapped in Heller’s unmistakably nostalgic prose. Sewn together by uncomplicated rhythm and theme, these poems reveal a subtle, yet rich glimpse into the progression of Heller’s own life, where she exhibits the joys and pains associated with all the steps we take between those before adolescence and those after adulthood. Heller employs simple language—language that is fundamentally folk—which captures in its aforementioned clear-cut rhythm a sound that effectively shows us the allures of activism, on scales either small or large, in the realms of both public and private life. (more…)