Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 48 pp.
$12.95 plus s&h
2008, ISBN 978-0932412-7136

Alice George’s poems meet the threats of everyday life with a lifted chin, a jaundiced eye and a sense of humor. Exploring materials from folklore and fairy tales, politics and science within the matrix of her clear lyric, she invites us into an imaginative world of unusual range and immediacy.

The disconcerted atheist resorts to Google
by Alice George

to bolster her loyalty to unbelief. And finds
exactly what she needs: Spirituality is the human

expressed in terms of the non-human, claims
Dr. David Eller in the American Atheist, and

thus a grand betrayal. The atheist leans into
the screen, hearing her parents, nodding her head.

Dr. E laments the map which western religion
draws of the inner life where the best,

the brightest, most ring-a-ding
moments arrive from beyond our borders.

As if humans couldn’t swell with beauty unbidden,
as if our cells weren’t splendid enough.

But her newish feeling this wish to be found?
Or to find, as if hugeness awaited her call?

Perhaps it is sexual, this naming of God,
quite simply, the wish to be entered,

or enter, and lonely, always lonely.
For of course she is.

Alice George grew up in Kentucky and received degrees first from Oberlin College and then the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA in Writing). She now lives in Evanston, Illinois, with her husband Shawn Decker, a sound and media artist. Alice teaches as a visiting poet in area schools and libraries, and as an instructor at the University of Chicago’s Graham School and Northwestern University’s Center for Talent Development. She served as an Editor of RHINO for 10 years and is now on the Advisory Board of that award-wining magazine