PRESENT MOMENT, PERFECT MOMENT

Name: PRESENT MOMENT, PERFECT MOMENT
Price: $22.99 USD
Author: KATHLEEN KEENA LPC LADC
ISBN: 9781663204608

by KATHLEEN KEENA LPC LADC

Formats

Softcover

$22.99

E-Book

$3.99

Softcover

$22.99

Book Details

Language : English

Publication Date : 7/14/2020

Format : Softcover

Dimensions : 8.5x8.5

Page Count : 148

ISBN : 9781663204608

Format : E-Book

Dimensions : N/A

Page Count : 148

ISBN : 9781663204615

About the Book

Present Moment, Perfect Moment is a collection of poetry addressing the nature of time, reflections on the natural world, the difficulty of loss, contemporary social issues and gratitude. These poems reflect the author, Kathleen Keena’s responses to life events starting in childhood, through her professional life as a Therapist and Clinical Director, and as Artistic Director of Theater, expressing literary responses to classic and contemporary theater. The poems begin in childhood and move into adult life, and include the evolution of her consciousness, through inner work and addiction recovery, to the last chapter, expressing gratitude for life.

About the Author

Kathleen Keena is a Connecticut Licensed Professional Counselor and Connecticut Licensed Alcohol and Drug Counselor. She was Clinical Director of a dual diagnosis outpatient agency, New Directions, of Enfield, Connecticut. Her first book, Adolescent Depression, (2005) explored issues of depression in the developing adult. It makes use of her adolescent writing to clinically explain the interior life of a depressed teen. Additionally, she taught theater and creative writing at Manchester Community College in Connecticut and directed plays, which her husband Clark Bowlen produced, with student casts. This inspired the writing of her second book, The Play’s the Thing, (2015) which takes the reader backstage to the creative collaboration of director, actors and audience. She holds A Masters’ degree in English Literature from Central Connecticut and another Masters’ degree in Counseling from Sant Joseph University. She was selected as one of ten playwrights to be produced at Keane University on issues of family caregiving.

Customer Reviews

Notes on Kathy Keena’s Present Moment, Perfect Moment. Poetry is verbal images of feelings; in Kathy Keena’s Present Moment, Perfect Moment, we got both poetry and Kathy Keena’s lyrical, visually flowing, abstract paintings. As a friend of Kathy, I know of the lasting pain she suffers from the small-plane accident that took the lives of both her beloved brother and uncle; and I saw how her pain was channeled through lines such as We loved to share Funny stuff; We both thought We’d share funny, forever Instead, my brother, You flew into the blue While I so sharply missing you. (See Big Kids, page 8) A poet, no matter how broken-hearted, never loses control of the sound and sense, the basic tools, of poetry. I love the poem, Suddenly, the Frost: They say no more snow For us, while Southern California Forests blaze. (See Suddenly, the Forest, page 36). The economy of words! I could feel Nature weeping through these lines.

David Law
Better read than dead Having had the privilege to have read poet Kathy Keena’s works for over forty years I say with certainty that “Present Moment, Perfect Moment” stands as her greatest and most personal work. It is a powerful epithet for her journey and could only be published now, given that its scope spans a lifetime. Across the years she has grown as a writer and poet from what were at times individual accounts of depression and alienation to what have become profound expressions of the shared human experience. The former were akin to reading a diary, the latter, art. Look at her earlier work and compare it to “Venice in June” or “The business of death” for example. Kathy sees acutely and remembers. She writes not of the usual or mundane but the painful and poignant. Her poems are not nostalgic but rather crystallized vignettes of moments typically unnoticed but instantly recognizable. It is her particular gift to write of loss, suffering, silence and nature (of both the body and world). She does so in terms often minute in scale but mythic in proportion. Kathy is an artist acutely attuned to human angst and has always had a sense of otherness about her. She writes of the silence between breaths. Her palate is of deep blues, purples, greys with only an occasional hint of brightness. She can be challenging to read because her words are so raw and it is apparent that she has so little protection from the pain of the world. Kathy writes of what has been sought and what has been lost or never found, leaving the reader aching for both. All of her adult work (from theater to writing to counseling) has been asking the question of whether we are finally alone at the edge of the abyss or if there is a redeeming meaning behind it all. Her earlier poems offered little hope. In this book, at last, she gives us a coda that while the abyss is ever near, love is the only answer that redeems and makes bearable all the rest.

William Thomas

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