Longtime friend of this blog Maggie Swanson recently published a collection of her blog posts from over the past five years. It includes many of her poems, opinion posts, fiction and artwork. As
she has been one of my most loyal readers, I just had to read it.
It is a very enjoyable collection, and as a long time reader of her blog, it was fun to revisit some of the old posts. I could remember reading many of them when they were originally posted years ago, and it was a pleasure to revisit them. For anyone who hasn’t read them, I recommend getting this book. Maggie has a talent for poetry, and is extremely inventive in the way she plays with the language.
My only complaint has nothing to do with the book’s content, but rather with its formatting. I’m not sure how much control she has over this even, but sometimes titles of poems would appear at the bottom of one page, and the entire poem on the next page. Also, because the book is printed in black and white, much of the originally colorful artwork suffers as a result. but I imagine it would be extremely expensive to print in color, so this may be unavoidable.
These issues aside, it’s a delightful collection of posts; well worth it for the clever poetry alone. I’ve learned over the past two years just how hard it is to publish a book, so I’m glad she was able to do it. You can get “Whaddya Know!” here.
