With The Bloomsberries and Other Curiosities Laurie Byro combines intellectual firepower, wit, and mischievous wisdom to earn her place in poetry's memory. Here, a new calculus for the Bloomsbury set is refreshed by energy, imagination, along with natural strengths of craft and metrics. I love these characters recreated; I love reading their stories as they chase each line to new poetic mythologies. In 'Other Curiosities' Byro unleashes her true anarchism, turning fairytale to reality. This book is a starship with history and fantasy blasted to brilliance. It's the promise made, that poetry will always be on our side- soul, heart, intelligence- blown out of dark, landing right in our laps, just when we need it the most. Grace Cavalieri, Producer "The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress."
Laurie Byro's lyrical collection offers a tour of art's afterlife, with a particular focus on haunted modernism. In The Bloomsberries and Other Curiosities, Virginia Woolf sings to the stones that will fill her pockets, Hart Crane makes an "epistle" of himself, and forests remember fictional heroes out of D.H. Lawrence. When she isn't looking upward at literature's "dandelion stars"-that is, in more personal poems also included here-Byro casts vivid spells against loss, reminding us that poetry is an art of memory, and of transformation.
-Lesley Wheeler, author of Radioland
With literary insouciance and metrical verve, Laurie Byro makes her debut with The Bloomsberries and Other Curiosities. Arranged like a diptych, the first half of the book opens with the Bloomsbury cast. Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Dora Carrington, plus D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot, make guest appearances in Byro's witty, sensuous, thoughtful, flippant, but dead serious poems. In the "other curiosities" half of her lyrical, piquant book, Byro explores art and artists in elegant stanzas written from, of, and to contemporary poets and poems. With the wry, dry love notes of The Bloomsberries and Other Curiosities. this poet practices a sublime ekphrasis.
Molly Peacock
About the Author: Laurie Byro has been facilitating "Circle of Voices" poetry discussion in New Jersey libraries for over 16 years. She is published widely in University presses in the United States and is included in an anthology St. Peter's B List (Ave Maria Press, 2014). Laurie garnered more IBPC awards (InterBoard Poetry Community) than any other poet, stopping at 50. She had two books of poetry published in 2015: Luna (Aldrich Press) and Gertrude Stein's Salon and Other Legends (Blue Horse Press). A chapbook was published in 2016 Wonder (Little Lantern Press) out of Wales. She received a 2016 New Jersey Poet's Prize for the first poem in the Stein collection and a 2017 New Jersey Poet's Prize for a poem in the Bloomsberries collection. Laurie is currently Poet in Residence at the West Milford Township Library, where "Circle of Voices" continues to meet.
