Kyi May Kaung's review of JoAnne Growney's Red Has No Reason -- poetry

Kyi May Kaung – Review of JoAnne Growney’s poetry chapbook, Red Has no Reason:
• Paperback: 82 pages
• Publisher: Plain View Press (May 15, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1935514520
• ISBN-13: 978-1935514527
This amazing little volume of poems, meticulously made and carefully sequenced, is like picking up a precise multifaceted jewel, seeing now and then flashes of red, and sometimes just feeling the sense of red, without overt showy splashes.

Featured are Growney's signature square poems, which always confound a non-able-to-count intuitive poet and painter like me. How can she stick to these exact rules and still produce a sentence with astounding truth value?

The poems look simple, but they aren't.
Somewhere in there is a mother, like mine, who withheld praise.

The counting poem of the farmer's daughter is spectacular and clear-eyed.

The hammer poem shows a sound sense of rhythm and a great ear for sounds.

Kyi May Kaung.
Burmese-American poet.
August 2010