Soul Bleeds The Poetry, Melodies, and Other Wanderings of Karen Wiesner

Book excerpt: Every poem ever written shows us the eyes of the poet. Looking without. As love mirrors the heart, poetry mirrors personality. Many poets write about things outside of themselves. This mirrors their personal character and the way they look at the world. Looking within. Other poets take the outside world into themselves and use the intimate emotions to reveal their own hearts. Just looking. Then there are poets like me, who do a little of both...or a lot of neither. If you're looking for flowery observations on nature, rhyming pieces with any type of standard or pattern, seemingly meaningless verses that you have to know the ""code"" to understand, you won't find it here. The 39 poems included a combination of honesty, raw emotion, vivid imagery, gritty reality, story metaphors, introspection, depression, and even ""song-like"" verses. Great poetry is something I can relate to, that moves me, that takes the human condition and makes it both frail and somehow beautiful in its starkness.