Stryker is a particularly sensitive observer of the eternal, and here she plies this skill with humor and pathos, recording the heartbreak of love. Starcrossed hums with bighearted music.
–– Amy Pickworth, author of Bigfoot for Women
Linda Stryker’s Starcrossed is a spirited collection of poems
steeped in science, music, irony, contemporary culture, and love
gone wrong. Stryker’s voice is witty, humorous, oddball, and
highly intelligent. A buzz of a read!
–– Susan Vespoli, author of Road Trip
Starcrossed is a brilliant book concerned with much more
than the travails of disappointed love. The spellbinding poems
take the reader on a self-described emotional roller coaster.
It's a dizzying ride, propelled by language that remarkably
reinvents itself from line to line and poem to poem––serving
a human spirit that jokes and dances and dares to shout back
at a hostile universe with its "cryptic" message.
–– Bob Longoni, author of Woodpiles
***
Artist’s Statement
I love words. I love the music of words, the puzzle of words, the ambiguity / the multiple meanings of words that expand the brain until it fills the universe. I’ve lived a few years more than the expiration date stamped on my behind would indicate. I am a musician, so naturally I love to play with the sounds of words, lines, stanzas, the flow of melody and counterpoint, the interlocking polyphonic strands and wisps of sense and nuance, interpretation and realization.
Finding/receiving a good poem requires one to be looking for it, to be open to it, and to be willing to work like the very dickens to tease out the shy thing into daylight. One great poem a year would be recompense enough. Several good ones will have to do. I strive to be an archaeologist, digging, digging, until golden lines are found; or perhaps may I be an organist of words, searching for a brief, noble motif.
***
Ikea Tragicomedy
"I can't stand it! The last fly-by-night one-night stand."
You punned that, in your skivvies, leaping atop our night table
(the brown one I put together from a kit
I got at Ikea and covered with the blue towel),
shouting at me. Orator, you are not. Traitor to love, tirader non-pareil,
rater of lips, equator of insensitivity, eater of peace, beater of chest.
You Tarzan, me plain Jane. You ape Manolete,
machete of life lines. Pathetic abuser,
user of us, used to deference: Mister,
Master. Yessir, yessir, three bags
full of it. Hah! Ikea nightstands aren’t made
to stand up to your crap. I can’t laugh anymore.