‘Swallowing Stones’

Poet chronicles grief and transcendence

Cottekill poet Lisa St. John has been published in a long list of anthologies and journals and won several awards.

“Swallowing Stones,” her first book, is a wildly evocative ride focused on love, grief and reawakening to joy, as experienced by someone whose love and grief are both fine-tuned to the particular and deep and wide enough to embrace all life.

The stones she swallows are so hot they sizzle, finding form in deft, meticulous and precisely chosen words that hit like a chainsaw, evoking the devastation of widowhood and the loss of one’s true love to cancer. “Give me back the world/of Mexican beaches/and the two of us dancing/alone/ late at night/before bed,” she writes in “Stomping My Foot,” letting the reader inside the coming together of pleading and demanding when we know both will be in vain.

Part II glides smoothly onto the sharpened blade of life as a woman – part exultation, part rage, part anguish. St. John picks up her stones and examines their facets, cracks, smoothed surfaces and curves with an unflinching gaze, giving eloquent voice to the particular wounds and glories of the female experience in ways that center us amid the blood, mud and beauty of human existence.

Damn, this is starting to sound like a lecture! Let’s pivot back to the playful nature of the question. Your list is great. A big question might be, do you actually want to stay ON the deserted island? (It’s some people’s dream come true). Or are you trying to get OFF this island and on to one with an All Inclusive Club Med and lots of people?

If you don’t like humanity, then the deserted island itself would be on your list of things you can’t live without. If not, might I suggest a jetpack or a surfboard to immediately vacate this isolated, sand flea ridden, scorched earth hellhole?

And if you stay because you like it, and can get enough chocolate airdropped because it’s top 5 on your list anyway, you know your deserted island will then become a desserted island :). (Snare and cymbal hit please!) – Wally

P.S. Don’t forget the dog food or YOU may be the dog food. Also use suntan lotion. (Damn, I can’t not lecture! Just ask my 15-year-old daughter)

Got a question for our advice columnist or just want to whisk him away to your all-inclusive tropical island made out of love, gratitude, guitars and cell phones? Email him at cwn4@aol.com.

Those existential questions are taken head on in Part III, opening with an incredibly powerful poem, “Why We Are Here,” that rings like a powerful sermon or the closing argument of a brilliant defender, as does “Label Me Human,” later in the collection. These are anthems. St. John’s feminism and anti-war passion never stoop to mere politics; this voice speaks from an awareness of the larger transcendent connections we can find, often by paying attention to the “little” things – breath, bugs, subtle gradations of color, the slant of the sunlight.

To close the collection, St. John circles back to grief and widowhood with fresh strength, and sticks the landing perfectly. Unsurprisingly, her Feb. 19 book launch at Stepping Stone Creative Center is sold out; but a Meet the Author event is planned for the same venue sometime in March. Meanwhile, you can purchase the book at www. lisachristinastjohn.com.