The Women Come and Go, Talking

Mr. T. S. Eliot may have naively assumed that the women he observed tripping along, heads close together, were chatting about Michelangelo, but he was ill-informed. As we learn from Janice D. Soderling's latest collection, they were slyly bragging about having pulled one over on jealous lovers who spurned them (Lesbia) or a sneaky card shark (Poker Pearl), or they were sharing inside experience of male sexuality (Odette). Some relate secondhand gossip about the woman ranting up-stairs or the martial arts feminist in the violet house. Wiping away an occasional tear, others tell how they were done wrong by an unfaith-ful male (the little mermaid, a witchy sonneteer, the lady arrested in her Sunday hat). All the tales are recounted without self-pity in formal or free verse, in short and long-ish poems. But don't be fooled as Mr. Eliot was. There is a serious undercurrent in the rambuctious gaity; what female, dead or alive, has not once walked speaking in low voices of these delicate matters. As an Epilogue reminds us, these layered po-ems "hold many lessons girls may learn." Janice D. Soderling has published a large body of poetry, flash fiction, short stories, essays and translations in international journals and anthologies including The Great American Wiseass Anthology; Best of Our Stories; Nothing Short of: Selected Works from 100-Word Stories, The Centrifugal Eye Five Year Anthology; and Grupp 84. Significant prizes and awards include first prize for short fiction at Glimmer Train Stories, the Harold Will Memorial Award from Blue Unicorn, and the 2007 Award from the Foundation for Women Artists (Sweden). She was selected by Rattle as the European reader at the first podcast production of the acclaimed Transatlantic Poetry Series founded by Robert Peake. Janice D. Soderling has read at international venues in Europe and the United States. A number of her poems are published in Spanish translation by Alesia Ribalta Guzmán, and in Albanian translation by Fadil Bajraj.