Drawn Parallels

DRAWN PARALLELS By JoAnne Bauer Ph.D. Coining the term poemoir to describe her book prize-winning author JoAnne Bauer tells stories from her life in this two-part collection of narrative and lyric richness. Her past surfaces deftly and often humorously through complex layers of poetic imagery and memory. This ekphrastic project provides thought-enriching overlays and echoings as Bauer references work of master artists musicians philosophers and other literary folks as well as offering her original mixed media collages and altered photographs. In five sections we travel with her --from a sheltered childhood into armored feminism and past the twists and turns of loves’ vicissitudes emerging into good-natured fun and transformed by earned wisdom ready to reckon with mortality’s abrupt shortcomings. From the immediacy of captured details her personal and unique path flowers into universal revelations about a woman’s life fully lived.