in Mexico with Rose Hunter (or: reading A Foal Poem)

For the last couple of days, i've been in Mexico every morning for some minutes. It's one of the countries i've never been to myself, but that doesn't feel all foreign - there even is a city i walked through in images and in lines repeatedly: Puerto Vallarta, home of poet + friend Rose Hunter.

Her book A Foal Poem is both a collection of poems, and a poetic travelogue that takes the reader into the inner reality of places, beyond the tourist facades. it starts with a map, and my first touch of it was "Aposematic" - a poem that was first published in BluePrintReview, here's one of its road lines:

me the butterfly and you the relentless road,
with zircon glints
!

Later, another poem become base of a collaboration that moved through several places: Puertos, and on the third page, it's Puerto Vallarta again, with its beach road, the Malecón:

concrete for miles, yet
it's this section
of the Malecón
that has been
chosen for
soapy water
bucket
bleach

Finally, when Foal took shape, i helped with the cover- the image is based on a street scene from Vallarta, and the process of getting the cover together for POD later lead to a (rather unpoetic) how-to-entry in the blueprint book blog: How to create a book cover for print-on-demand services like CreateSpace

but back to Foal:
I first read the book right after it was published, and now am revisiting it, and like with journeys, when visiting a place again, you see more, the details, the patterns forming within, how one place and thought leads to another. maybe that started already during the first read, when at some point, i felt drawn to gather lines for a found poem, which eventually got published in the Found Poetry Review: Or, a Moral Inventory

Someone recently said: "With books like this, I don't need to travel, I get there in words" - and this is how Foal feels to me, this touch of another place, woven into pages that wrap you up while reading - and like with most foreign places, it takes a bit to get into this different world that comes with rebar houses and tejones appearing - until, at some point, those become part of your own  vocabulary, and you find yourself, walking along a relentless road, thinking of a foal. 
--

Book link, About,  & Review Forward

For more about Rose's book Foal, her bio, and her other books, visit her website

Some lines about me: I'm into roads, stories, places, crossings, and all the things they lead and connect to. I edit BluePrintReview and the blueprint book + lit blog. For more of my personal book reviews, click here: "Books", and for a bit more about me and the web projets i'm involved in, visit me at blueprint21. Apart from being an editor and blogger, I am also an author myself. My new book Worlds Apart just launched, and Rose was one of the authors who read an early version of it and accompanied the whole process that leads from draft to final book. Thanks for that!

Worlds Apart - a true story about 2 friends, 2 journeys, and 10 life lessons:  
In the global world, a traveler from Europe and a teacher from Asia meet in the web, share their journeys, and the joys, longings, and life lessons that wait along the road. Captured in letters and photos that reach from China and India to Germany and the Mediterranean Sea, a dialogue across continents and cultures unfolds: Worl(d)s Apart

Review Forward: This book review is inspired by Review Forward, a new online initiative for authors & book bloggers. For more reviews, visit the facebook page or the twitter-stream.

Found Poetry: Or, a Moral Inventory

the fall issue of the Found Poetry Review is online. their tagline: "celebrating the poetry in the existing and everyday." which connects to the whole theme of revisiting, reshaping, recreating. so i opened some existing poetry: "Foal" by Rose Hunter. and started to leaf through it, not reading the full poems or stanzas, but only single lines from each page.

and arrived at: Or, a Moral Inventory

piecing the found poem together also made me look up garrafones: they are huge water bottles, their name derived from a measure: a garrafon equals 5 gallons. the other spanish word in the poem, Los Muertos, i knew from the festive day: "Dia de los Muertos" - the day of the dead.

the audio? still shy about recording my own voice, but interesting to hear the same lines in the different voices.

and the place in the picture - that's Lanzarote island. the photo actually is taken at the southern bay, yet looking inwards. another photo from the same place, same day, is online here: rainbow day (2nd photo). which now leads to another returning / found question: how many different images can be found in one place?

bahia de navidad zeitlos aureole

the next 2 pages are up in the blueprintreview two² issue: "Dual Track Mind" and "Almost There".

both pages come with images that i digitally rendered here on the computer: in "Almost There", the origial photo of aureole is from Mallorca, an ovean view of the Bay of Polencia in the North of the island. here's a more "classic" version of that Bay: sunrise at the bay.

and the Dual Track Mind image is a 2 layer-photo: the first image is from Rose Hunter, taken at a bay in Mexico: bahia de navidad, and the second is from the town square here, during the time of the public viewing of the world cup. (can't remember the game).

Rose Hunter blogged about it today with the original images, her blog note starts with the good news that her poetry collection to the river is now ready for pre-orders - congrats!!
blog post link: to the river bahia de navidad zeitlos wowee doctor people!

to join the add-another-theme-and-layer-mood, i now merged both images, out came the one above.

and looking through the 2 new two² pages again, i realized that those pages indeed reach around the world: from South America / Mexico to the Marquesas in the Pacific Ocean, and from the coast of Mallorca to Arizona: a world trip in 2 pages.

will go and try to figure out which football match was playing that day, to add 2 more nations.