Books
Bus Stop Poems and Art
Elbow Room Press | 2020
Copies available – contact Cecelia or write to ElbowRoomPress@gmail.com
(Proceeds from the sale of this book go to First Place Family Center)
This book consists of the 26 poems engraved on steel panels at each stop of West Eugene’s rapid-transit bus route, as well as images of the art in the stops’ steel rails, benches, and ceramic tiles.
Review of Bus Stop Poems by Erik Muller: https://oregonpoets.org/eugenes-public-poetry/
Entering
Airlie Press | 2011
Moving from the Eastern Seaboard to the Pacific Northwest, these poems enter and explore interior and exterior landscapes. Using direct speech, humor, and deft metaphors, Cecelia Hagen writes about the emotional terrain of experiences that are both savored and plundered, resisted and surrendered to. The wryness here is unmistakable, and cohabits with poignancy as if the barriers between those often opposed states of being had been somehow melted.
I love the clear, sensual music of Cecelia Hagen’s Entering, the strange and ruined beauty of this solitary poet’s landscapes, the bristled and voluptuous memories of growing up, each rough truth: the knife that ‘speaks to what it cuts’ (saying) ‘your turn.’
Dorianne Laux
These are poems of experience, and they come from a body and a poet alive in the world, a woman who sees ‘…a vulgar beauty / I can’t help loving a little more than I want to.’
Michael McGriff
Quietly audacious and finely tuned, Cecelia Hagen’s poems capture nature and humanity in all their seasons, all their wildness, all their tenderness. Entering is an exquisitely crafted book, breathtaking in its clarity.
Barbara Ras
Among Others
Traprock Books | 2010
Copies available from the author.
These poems depict the sometimes humorous, sometimes baleful struggle to keep it together. Persona poems speak from the perspective of workers who harvest sunbeams, the owner of a speedboat who’s bought something he can’t afford, someone who dreams of sneaking into heaven, and a man who, in spite of his stilted social graces, is attempting to re-enter society. A suite of thirteen poems voiced by “Clown” is threaded throughout these other voices, Clown being perhaps the most peculiar and sad-sack circus figure in history.
Inspired by “The Coat,” which appears in this book, composer John Lundblade composed music for a vocalist and string quartet, performed here by Siri Vik and the Delgani String Quartet.
Fringe Living
26 Books | 1999 (Out of Print)