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| Marjorie (2002) |
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| " ... a hot-wired, coming-of-age odyssey about a teen-age girl whose sexual awakening coincides with a growing awareness that the adults in her life are a pathetic group [of] emotional phonies. Her parents and teachers seem morally and intellectually inept, allowing cruelty to go unpunished and hypocrisy unchallenged. This short novel [,] set in a small town during the early ’60s [,] will annoy as many readers as it satisfies. The sex is explicit and energetic. Marjorie is willing to experiment, and her experiments are sure to offend anyone with a narrow sexual perspective. It’s a light, humorous story with a marshmallow-crude undertow that will suck some in and spit others out." — R.A. Walker, Williamsport Sun-Gazette (2002)
"I was a little taken aback by this book, but I'm not sure why. I guess I expected a simple coming of age yarn with a fair amount of adolescent angst, parental domination and lots of yelling, kind of like the atmosphere around my house when I was Marjorie's post-pubescent age. But Lawrence Bassett's character Marjorie has quite a bit more curiosity and guts about her sexual experimentation than I ever did. (My mother would be so proud.) Marjorie is having an identity crisis and, no matter what, no matter "who" everyone tells her she should be, Marjorie is determined to figure life out for herself, on her own terms and by doing whatever it takes ... I found myself wanting more from Marjorie. On deeper scrutiny, I wondered if that was the author's point. The secondary characters all want something more from Marjorie, too. Her parents want her to be a good girl and dress appropriately, her friends want her to fit into their friend mold, her boyfriend wants her to be available, but only on his terms. Maybe that's the point. Decide for yourself. And see if you have unanswered questions when you're done." — Julia Schuster, emeraldcoast.com (2003)
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| Possum Love and Other Poems (2005) |
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| When I'm touring schools with my "got poetry?" programs, someone will sometimes ask how I got to be a poet. "I started writing poetry to impress the girls in seventh grade," I answer, and then I tell her or him that it wasn't until I saw the girls flocking around the basketball players that I realized I had made a terrible mistake. It was basketball, not poetry, that got the girls.
But that was then, and in another country, as they say. I still can't make an easy layup and the simplest defensive moves on a basketball court are still beyond me, but I've spent the better part of the past fifty years working at my poetry.
The thirty-four poems in Possum Love and Other Poems were written between the late Seventies and late 2003 and represent, if nothing else, why I never learned the pick and roll.
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| Available Now!! — A New Chapbook |
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Northern Tier
From the creak of pond ice
to the buzz of summer bees,
the new poems in this collection
celebrate the life and landscape
of Pennsylvania's Northern Tier.
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