Description:
Dawn Anyway is a collection of 40 short poems exploring encounters in each of the four seasons. The book seeks to light a candle in the darkness of our times, affirming the truth that there is still beauty, wisdom, meaning, and joy to be found in the world and in our lives. These are poems of love, for the dawn and for the wider natural world.
Dawn Anyway is designed by noted Maryland artist Suzanne Shelden of Shelden Studios, whose paintings of creatures and of high South-Atlantic places and local history have a dedicated following. Shelden's books, like her paintings, are works of art.
Brief description: Kate Lassman, whose maiden name is Moose, aspired to study insects but was lured away by poetry. Now, those two interests intersect in poems such as "The Mantis." Since she left the Rockies for the high south Atlantic - Virginia and Maryland - and took her husband's name, she left moose behind; the fox is the wildest creature in her poems, and the cat the most common. Kate studied at George Mason University under Prof. Erik Pankey, earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry. She is much published in journals print and online and is a contributor to Pax: An Anthology of Southern Maryland Poetry. Dawn Anyway is her first solo book. Kate also teaches writing at the College of Southern Maryland.
Review Quotes:
"Kate Lassman's poems welcome the reader with their refreshing clarity, offering a world at once familiar and strange. The commonplace comforts and, at times, leaves the poet disoriented, off-kilter, surprised, perhaps even blessed by unexpected, epiphanic encounters, as in "Lines to a Fox," where the poet concludes, "I do not believe in coincidence/and though you did not find/whatever you came looking for, / in the sight of you here--risking, daring--/ perhaps I did." The poems are radiant and sincere in the moments they capture and inscribe."
-Erik Pankey, George Mason University professor and poet, author of Alias and Owl of Minerva