Poetry Books and Sample Poems; Works of Fiction; Screenplays
Background: Barnyard Poems
POETRY
A WOMAN MILKING WORD PRESS, 2006
I was a backyard farmer for 8 years, raising goats, ducks and hens, both for the joy of that interraction, and for food. The work in A Woman Milking, WORD PRESS, 2006 ($15) uses life in my barnyard as metaphor for human conflict and closeness.
Critical Acclaim for A WOMAN MILKING:
---"Slatkin's poems, eloquent depictions of the human-animal dynamic, remind us of our own desires, fears, and mortality. Each poems is a serious and significant vignette--revelatory moments cultivated by the poet's empathy and imagination." Mindy Kronenberg, Editor, BookMark Quarterly Review; Author, Dismantling the Playground.
---"These poems evoke emotions ranging from devastatiing pathos to unexpectedly buoyant humor. The rhythms of the tests easily lend themselves to musical expression and it was a joy for me to set six of them to music." Marga Richter, Composer, QHANRI: Tibbetan Variations for cello and piano.
---"Marcia Slatkin sees life as a parade of small miracles. With skill, she maintains a sense of wonder both at moments large and small. So she celebrates the child in all of us." Dan Moran, Poet, Looking for the Uncertain Past; Poet Laureate Suffolk County.
---"Using fresh, invigorating language, these poems are unsentimental but full of feeling, pictorial as well as highly textured, the voice fearless, but compassionate. Slatkin is sustained by her barnyard, yet is not afraid to take us with her as she sustains the animals through their own passages: birthing and loss, the fierce coupling of buck and doe, the sad atrophy of old age, the painful ambivalence of slaughter, and, yes, the indignity of being eaten." Myriam Chapman, Author, Why She Married Him.
---"Slatkin succeeds in creating poetry not of self or other, or pleasure or pain, but of self and other and pleasure and pain crystallized together in the same brief poetic form, sometimes in the same moment. This is the a kind of truth not brought to the page often enough, and here lies the core of Slatkin's achievement." Charles Holdefer,
Author, Apology for Big Rod.from A Woman Milking:
What The Stars Are
The buck chased her,
his fullness toward her tail.
When she would not stay,
he reared, hit the sharp
yard rail, and sprayed.The man in the moon
was like that.In the dark,
he pawed the earth's
soft waist. His fingers
clawed beneath her clouds.And when she turned away,
he arched his backand sprayed
the night with stars.* * * * * * * * * *
I KIDNAP MY MOTHER -- Finishing Line Press, 2005
The three and a half years I've so far spent as care-giver to my mother, an Alzheimer patient, have fueled poems both about the ramifications of illness, and the use of time together as an opportunity for reconciliation, healing, closeness. Twenty-six of these poems have been collected and publised in the chapbook I Kidnap My Mother, Finishing Line Press, 2005 ($12).
Acclaim for I Kidnap My Mother:
---"Each page is a small, lush painting, as if the poet circled her mother, illuminating both declime, and triumphs within that decline, with precisions and acceptance. Cortney Davis, Author, Leopold's Maneuvers.
---"With unflinching observation, slatkin allows herself honesty mixed with tenderness, a triumph over pathos." Claire Nicolas White, Author: Death of the Orange Trees.
---"The poems, replete with eye-opening images, are warm and strong as the mother-child bond: beauty trapped and held in clean language."
Adele Glimm, author: Elizabeth Blackwell, Woman Doctor.from I Kidnap My Mother
Solicitude
Amid a maze
of age spots, raised
as gravel, walnut hued
and jagged in shape,my mother's breasts
emerge, still pink,
unscarred though fallen,
guileless on a sheet
of rippled skin.And after donning
bra and snapping
straps in place,
she gathers them up
like scooping pliant
honey with a spoon,
or shaping dough
to buns that fit a pan --and rests obedient lobes
in waiting slings slowly,
cradling each with vein-rich,
careful hands.FICTION: The Rain That Lets Things Live: A Mosaic --
42 stories looking for a publisherCreative and exuberant, Paula lives within a troubled family run by an overbearing, anxious mother who needs for her to achieve. Paula's journey is compelling. There is compliance, rebellion, and deep unhappiness. There is the decision to haul herself up and out of the hole that the shovel of confusion has helped her dig, and there is subsequent experimentatiion /self-assertion. Paula then cares for, is guardian to, forgives and comes to deeply love the now-ill mother who so shaped her early life. And, happily, we see Paula arrive at a solid, emotionally powerful place. The stories move the reader along this trajectory in dialogue-rich. humorous, figurative prose. Fast-paced, the book has the texture of crunchy granola, full of seeds, nuts and fruit. MMM. Good reading!
"Play the game, get ahead, be realistic," says Shirley, the strong-willed, controlling yet fiercely loving mother who draws the contours that her daughter Paula must explode and erase in her quest for identity.
Years pass, roles are reversed, and Paula becomes caregiver to the mother she so fought in youth. What growth will allow understanding and forgiveness? And how will this be transmuted into the receptive and accepting interior landscape that allows "the rain that lets things live" to nurture new love?
"One of the most impressive qualities of this novel is the way Slatkin avoids plot contrivance while writing one eye-opening, unpredictable section after another. And Slatkin's writing is as agile as her imagination. A lover who lives with her while neither working on his book nor sharing expenses is 'coddled in this household, immersed in cream. Paula has come to see the book as a hungry animal, curled in Nick's chest, sucking.' "
Adele Glimm, author, Elizabeth Blackwell, Woman Doctor.
PLAYS:
UPSIDE DOWN: Full Length Play.
When our world turned upside down during the 9/11 attacks, conflicts arose between people whose reactions, assessments and coping devices differed. Can one refuse to question, to imagine ramifications? Do Parental politics play a role in our present reactions? Indeed, do past parental conflicts influence our choice of a mate?
Come and live in NYC during this fearsome time with JOEL, photojournalist who lost one eye in Desert Storm, Iraq; the young artist EMMA, who comes to love him; her former boyfriend DAVID, Israeli-born securities trader whose sister died in the 2001 WTC attack; the zany, sensitive jamaican ZAK, a voice crying in the wilderness, and Emma's friend JOANN, who becomes Zak's sweetie and learns to cook Jamaican hot!MEMORY: FUll Length Play
"Memory" is a dramatization of not only the traumas Alzheimer's disease brings to a family, but the miraculous if temporary happiness that can be reached through spunk, caring, and chemistry. ... Here we find the turmoil and humor perhaps typical of a Jewish family's reaction to illness in the early 21st century. And in it, we see the triumph of a passionate and vividly determined old lady"
BKLYNHEIGHTS Courier, March 2 2007--Can a grown daughter navigate between her own needs, those of her husband, and those of her aged mother, newly diagnosed with Alzheimer Disease?
--Will an 85 year old widow with more than a touch of dementia enjoy romance and relationship with a man she met at her senior center?
-=- What choppy currents make care-giving our aged parents both difficult -- and exhilarating?
ONE-ACTS, Full Lengths, and Screen Plays
HOME FRONT, aka MACHETE -- screenplay
Logline: Joyce tries heroically to protect her family after her teenaged daughter Iris begins to date an unstable veteran. Joe, paranoid and not getting the medical attention he needs, becomes increasingly menacing. "They bring the war home with them," Joyce sayd, "and no one is safe." Set in the US during the Sandinista - Contra conflict, 1983, a tragi-comic political subplot helps braid the script to its brutal conclusion.
Postal address: PO BOX 663, Shoreham, NY 11786
