Please join Synkroniciti in welcoming back poet Lori Howe. We are thrilled to feature two of her luscious cadralor: “The Peculiar Electromagnetic Gravity of Niagara Falls” and “Magnetoreception.” Cadralore are poems in a series of five episodes, each of the five stanzas functioning on their own and painting its own particular image. The connection between the stanzas is intuitive and not overstated, but can be quite powerful. The first poem moves us from an October birch near the bus stop to a poet’s dreamscape and feast, then on to the edge of Niagara Falls which has drawn so many humans into its strange gravity in barrels and capsules, to the glassblowers island of Murano where fire could send molten turquoise glass to the sea bed, and lastly to a quiet cafe at dusk. What is it that draws us humans on to tomorrow–always failing and falling and yet full of beauty and light? Lori has a wonderful talent for melancholic joy–it might seem an oxymoron, but the creative mind tends to experience this state and it can be fertile ground for creation. She is able to put into words an ambiguity that many would find inscrutable, making it into an old familiar friend. “Magnetoreception” begins with her brother and his friends harvesting scorpions and dropping them into her mother’s old purse; continues with a mackerel harvest in Stavanger, Norway; explores the magnetic map sense of sea turtles, pigeons, bees and humans; joins a crowd making snow angels in Bismarck, North Dakota; and finally considers the human eye: the optic nerve “an absent telephone operator between the retina and the brain.” For Lori, science is magic and alchemy, not in the sense of the supernatural, but in the sense of the wondrous and intricate.
Order your copy of “Wild” to experience Lori’s beautifully crafted poems: 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, McQueen’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.