Flashes & Specks: Poems by Diane R. Wiener (Finishing Line Press, 2021) can be ordered online.
Expected shipping date: 6/4/2021.
Advance praise for Flashes & Specks:
Lyric poetry is unlike its attraction to like. It proposes analogies but breaks the strings. Diane Wiener‘s poems build for and then against the like to like dichotomies of custom. There’s no one like her writing today. –Stephen Kuusisto
Reading Diane Wiener‘s chapbook, one can smell marine air, see birds flying, and feel the reach of trees as they sing and talk. We experience a poet’s “cyclical nonlinear mythical time” with awe at living among each other and nature. Readers will want to return to her sieve of words to savor the love, dreams, and hope these poems catch. –Clark A. Pomerleau
Diane Wiener‘s Flashes & Specks is a book of wit, intelligence and heart. This is a poet who is not afraid to call out absurdity when she sees it—who occupies the metaphysical plane with ease, but is also so keenly attuned to how nature speaks to us and through us and shares in our love and grief. Wiener’s poems draw us into the essential questions of our lives: “why that car was crushed/but not this one/why the sea star teemed/why the angle of light.” Buy this book; your life will be the richer for it. –Sheila Black
Visit Cover Artist, Lucy Wales. Commissions are welcomed.
[Image description: Full-color book cover featuring original artwork—“The Origins”—by Lucy Wales. Book title in rectangular banner, top; deep blue background with white sans serif, capitalized lettering. The words “Poems by Diane R. Wiener” (at the very top) look as if made with an old school label maker, with the effect of appearing to be embossed. The words “Flashes & Specks” (after a white horizontal line) have blue spots in the lettering, as if mottled—possibly like a Crip appaloosa horse. The main scene on the cover is a fantastical world depicting steampunk grasshoppers, slugs, and snails. The slugs are suspended from shells (like hot air balloons) as they travel from a watery planet-orb through the sky to the land below. When they land, the shells connect to their bodies, and they become snails. The grasshoppers, aloft, have top hats and gears; the slugs-to-snails have steam engines on their shells (with accompanying, emergent smoke) and wear monocles. The artwork is multi-media—ink with watercolor. The color palette is a reflective mixture of the environments depicted—blues, greens, grays, and tans, with some creams, ivories, whites, and, indeed, magic.]
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