lyrical, irreverent, earthy - poems for your heart and mind

***** Review by Whitney Scott

Readers may indeed take flight via Maureen Connolly’s aptly titled volume of thirty poems starting with excursions in “Reveries,” a sentimental journey recalling the sweet past: salami sandwiches, her mother’s almond-scented lotion, and ‘the warmth of the sun after loneliness’; and moving on to Chicago’s well-known hospital and L trains.
“Cook County Hospital,” recounts from the poet/physician’s eyes the Hellish birthing where ‘all labor together/in a fifty-foot-square room….Their groans/…a call and response’ – yet babies are birthed ‘trailing stardust.’ Little quirky humanity remains on the Green Line, once called the more descriptive Lake Street L, where real drivers called out the stops – her nod to nostalgia in “Riding the L” -- two wildly contrasting rides.

Along the way, we make our way down the Illinois River toward the Mississippi, passing factory towns and silhouetted smokestacks; hop on a Harley, riding where ‘skinny white clouds/stretch across gray skies’; and gaze at an artist’s mural commemorating Nature’s ‘fish, planets, a star birthing a star’ in this collection celebrating stubborn survival and rebirth.

Whether boarding the L train of nostalgia or lying ‘naked on the curve of the earth,’ this Winged trip is well worth it