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Book Description

The poems of Rooted and Winged explore the emotional and physical movement of flight and falling. They are of the earth, the place of fertile origins, and of the dream world we observe and imagine when we look upward. Golems and ghosts that emerge from the ground, as well as the birds and angels that live above us, inhabit the collection. We will always be striving for flight, even as we feel most comfortable closest to the earth.

Excerpt

Tuesday Afternoon at Magpie’s Grill
 
Flickering afternoon light slatted and parsed.
At 3PM, the booths empty except for me
and my notebook.
Would I notice if not for my companion,
my need to recognize and remember?
Without a record, will I hear the ice crashing
into the sink, the Dodger talk at the bar
at the end of the room under the Miller Lite
neon confident and beckoning?
My mother used to say about me,
In one ear and out the other, as if the words
flowed through me without stopping,
without truly entering me, leaving little
effect, as if I had no memory
of all the little parental transgressions.
Why am I not under the sycamore I spot
through the blinds in this Tuesday sunshine
listening to the very song with the shady tree?
What have I done with my life? When
I should have written a poem, I didn’t.
When I did, I didn’t get it quite right.
How can a poem do so many things:
wishing for the shade and thirsty for a beer,
feeling an urge to move my pen and noting
the tiny feet and brush of cuticle,
the solitary fly on my bare arm, while
imagining the chattering of the birds that swoop
from sycamore to jacaranda as if the parking lot
and dumpsters and broken bottles don’t exist.
No matter what I notice,
no matter what I record, I will never
capture the ease of wind-filled wings,
tail feathers a translucent backlit fan,
as my hollow bones jettison the detritus
to fly upward against the source.
 
© Luanne Castle

Praise for «Rooted and Winged»

The poems of Luanne Castle’s Rooted and Winged are embedded in land and weather. «Bluegills snap up larvae in slivers of illusory light,» she writes early in the collection, hinting at the sensibilities of the companionable speaker who will usher us through the book. She sees. She is open to the world out there. She calls herself «unknown but solid,» a teller of «tiny limitless tales.» She is engaged in the retrieval of generational memory: «one hairbrush, a plastic ball / a swaying branch, leaves decaying / the insides of my grandmothers’ fridges / bubble and pop into shards of memory / dangerous to the touch,» she writes, enacting the progression from concrete detail to concrete memory to the kind of numinous memory that can be combustible. How rare it is, to discover a writer who notices that «Grandma used to stand under the bulb over the sink that haloed her and pearlized the onions she chopped,» who can bring language to this: «When the last star falls to the others, / it darkens like the hush in a theatre, / a twinkling or two from silence.» There is no arrogance in this book, but there is power.–
Diane Seuss, Pulitzer Prize winning author, author of frank: sonnets, Four-Legged Girl, and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl

Luanne Castle’s Rooted and Winged is an intimate journey through a topography where home encounters wilderness, and where the speaker must determine what she owes to her children, to aging loved ones, to the land and its wild inhabitants, and to herself. In poetry that reveals the connection between what we inherit and what we leave behind, between what changes and what remains constant, Castle explores the mystery of what happens after a person «survives [her] own birth.» The resulting work is undeniably graceful, compelling, and heartrending. «The way the sun came between me and the water will always seem like an introduction,» Castle writes, as she deftly creates, from the seemingly mundane, «something splendid.»-Chera Hammons, author of Maps of Injury

Rooted and Winged is a fitting title for this collection of poems that plant themselves in reality but often hint at the surreal. Throughout, Luanne Castle has mastered sound and image: I’ve done my best with feet and fists, my small / lungs blossoming like paper flowers in water… The poem that lingers most for me is «A Year in Bed, with Windows» in which stark details create a palpable intimacy.
-Karen Paul Holmes, author of No Such Thing as Distance.

Review of Rooted and Winged by Carla McGill:
https://www.harbor-review.com/rooted-and-winged

Interview about Rooted and Winged at Gingerbread House:

Luanne Castle / Poem & Interview

Paperback (Hardcover is also available)

Author’s Biography

Luanne Castle lives in Arizona, next to a wash that wildlife use as a thoroughfare. She has published two full-length poetry collections, Rooted and Winged (Finishing Line Press 2022), a Book Excellence Award Winner, and Doll God (Kelsay Books 2015), which won the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Poetry. Her chapbooks are Our Wolves (Alien Buddha Press 2023), First Runner-up for the Eric Hoffer Award, and Kin Types (Finishing Line Press 2017), a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Luanne’s Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions, and Best of the Net-nominated poetry and prose have appeared in Copper Nickel, Your Impossible Voice, Gooseberry Pie, Bending Genres, Bull, The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Cleaver, Disappointed Housewife, South 85, Roi Fainéant, River Teeth, The Dribble Drabble Review, Flash Boulevard, Verse Daily, Saranac Review, Pleiades, American Journal of Poetry, The Mackinaw, Thimble, One Art, Lothlorien, River Teeth, MasticadoresUSA, Storyteller Poetry Journal, TAB, and other journals. Her Best of the Net-nominated mixed-media art has been showcased at Watershed Review, Wildscape, Mad Swirl, Raw Lit, and Thimble. Luanne blogs at Writer Site.