Mouth Quill: Poems with Ancestral Roots

Mouth Quill's twenty-one poems narrate an intimate journey of universal themes-of ancestors, displacement, migration, longing, and connection. Drawn from the author's childhood familiarity with ancient poems of her heritage, the collection's title, "mouth quill," is inspired by Finno-Ugric runic verse and refers to the "singer's magical tool." The work unearths many such poetic concepts, creating organic metaphoric connections from the distant past to present; occasionally, the reader is invited into magical realism: becoming "the spirit of an egg, carried by the sea to Iberia" before plummeting below the Baltic Ice Lake to find the "land mother will call home." Other poems display tragedies of history (war and displacement) and the effect of ancient world views-cataclysms, music and sacred nature-upon the author's childhood and present in the 21^st century, completing a tightly knit, lyrical arc of identity.

Author: Kaja Weeks
Publisher: Poetry Box
Published: 09/30/2020
Pages: 52
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.17lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.51w x 0.12d
ISBN: 9781948461627

About the Author
Weeks, Kaja: - Kaja Weeks is a poet, essayist and classically trained singer whose writing contemplates music and healing as well as identity through multiple generations. She is the American born daughter of World War Two refugees from Estonia, a northern land on the Baltic Sea. Moved by the pain and beauty of its history, she also loves the alliterative sounds, mythic lore and world views in that ancient Finno-Ugric culture. Many of these motifs, found in thousands of runic verses and long preserved by oral transmission, come alive in Kaja's creative work. Her poems, especially, weave new strands with timeless, universal themes of ancestors, displacement, migration, longing, and one's sense of self and other. Kaja was named a little songbird by the time she was five, singing hundreds of Estonian and English songs. Now she is also a clinic-based music educator in Maryland who engages young children with autism to their earliest communications with playful singing. Her ideas on development and early communicative musicality have been represented in trainings, lectures, keynote addresses and in scholarly journals in the United States and Canada. Kaja is a graduate of New Directions, a three-year writing program of the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis, where she studied with renowned writers in all genres as well as specialists in depth psychology. Kaja's literary writing has appeared in The Sugar House Review; Ars Medica: A Journal of Medicine, The Arts and Humanities; Under the Gum Tree; The Sandy River Review; The Potomac Review (nominee, Pushcart Prize) and elsewhere.

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