Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome back poet Lori Howe of Laramie, Wyoming. Two delectable cadralore grace the “Space” issue. “Wells” explores everyday things that become touchstones for deep musings and synchronicity: fruits and spices, the hair that Vermeer did not paint in his portrait of a Girl with a pearl earring, even a toothbrush that “will outlive me, knowing only my mouth,/ the curvature of my lips,/ for ten thousand years.” The intensity of Lori’s images calls into the poem not only the visual sense, but taste and touch as well. “Ripening” continues the sensual richness of her palette, moving from her backyard to Sicily to the abstract world of Niels Bohr to the rice fields of Yunnan before returning home into a photo. Our attention is transported effortlessly from one realm to the next, pausing to savor the textures, tastes and visions of disparate moments in time. I am particularly drawn to a group of donkeys in Sicily, who “want only your hand to find the velvety softness between their eyes.” Such exquisite, musical language and keen observation.
Experience “wells” and “Ripening” in Synkroniciti’s November 30th issue, “Space,” Vol. 5, No. 4, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Lori Howe is a co-creator of the new poetic form, the cadralor. She is also the author of Cloudshade: Poems of the High Plains (Sastrugi Press, 2015) and Voices at Twilight (Sastrugi Press, 2016). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as The Meadow, Clerestory, Red Hook, Verse-Virtual, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and Pilgrimage. She is a poetry editor with Sastrugi Press, as well as a phenomenologist whose peer-reviewed research appears in The Journal of Poetry Therapy, Qualitative Inquiry, and others.
She holds a Ph.D. in Literacy Education and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing/Poetry from the University of Wyoming, where she is now an Assistant Professor in the Honors College. She is the Editor in Chief of Gleam: Journal of the Cadralor and of Clerestory: Poems of the Mountain West.
She lives in Laramie, Wyoming.