Category Archives: linda addison

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Book Review: Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes by Linda D. Addison for Time and Space

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Although only 31 poems, Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes takes the reader in a million different directions as author Linda Addison ponders life, death and the love between. While some of the poems in this book are disturbing, like “Mourning Meal,” others are so personal that the reader may find themselves feeling like they are looking into a mirror more so than reading the words of another.

Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes has a dark energy, not to be confused with being evil nor depression. Darkness in the sense of being the opposite of ignorant bliss. For example, there are poems of love that are not lighthearted in nature.

Linda Addison composes these poems in a way that explores the depth of emotions that can be conjured when you give yourself up in totality to another person. “Before You” is such a poem. The relinquishing of the subject’s independence is what we all experience on some level when we enter deeply into a relationship.

There are other poems in Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes that exposes the curiosity of the writer. Poems like “A Bare Tree in February,” “Turning Edges” and “Breathe” ponder the origin of human existence in a way that only Linda Addison can render.

Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes is a personal collection of poetry that is timeless in its approach to be an offering of one’s soul. The level of introspective creativity will call the reader to come back to the poems in this book time and again.

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Book Review: Animated Objects by Linda D. Addison for Space & Time

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From the poem Writing Magic:

      Some writers choose just a scant few
      to say a lifetime of feelings,      While other writers
      gather thousands of words in a book
      to paint a few days of one life…


Animated Objects is Linda D. Addison’s debut offering. This is a mesmerizing mixture of poetry and short stories, fables and science fiction, enchanting fantasies and harsh realities. It will take you on a journey and touch you in places long forgotten or never experienced.

What makes this collection such a treasure is that Addison is such a skillful writer. She is able to be true to herself and her art form while turning the reader’s interpretation into participation. Her words can be as gentle as a mother’s hand, as sharp as a razor, as rough as a nail file and as blunt as a hammer.

This book has something for everybody without that being its purpose. A perfect example of the universal appeal of Animated Objects is the inclusion of bits and pieces of her personal journals that encompass twenty-seven years of of hopes, trials and disasters.

Reading those snippets let’s you see that which is usually hidden from the reader. You get to look past the writer as a person and instead get to look at the person as a writer. You get to peer into her world in a way that’s as cryptic as the light of her Night Bird yet as forthcoming as the birth of one child and the miscarriage of another.