Writing Naked - Coleen Marks

Writing Naked illuminates a life like a series of lightning flashes, allowing us glimpses

ranging over seven decades and six generations, from “sepia-toned” great-grandmothers

to a vivid little grandson. The opening poem, “It’s Time,” with its “Hey, I’m only

seventy-five” and “I always do better with deadlines,” sets the tone for a collection

always imbued with wit and joy, considering the sacred in the day-to-day, the humorous

in the tragic, the profound in simple clothing. This collection touches on personal

experiences with feisty kindness and startling drollery. Even the poems of bereavement

and loss are run through by a current of celebration and homage of the particular persons

and through them to life itself. Those dedicated to her father and to the husband who was

“the one” of her life are particularly strong and poignant. The title poem shows us the I

of this book, writing, sitting naked on a blanket, in full sunshine under a sky of Canaletto

blue, “hiding nothing,” as the poems themselves seem to do. Writing Naked is Coleen

Marks’ début collection and, yes, it’s time.

Enriqueta Carrington, Translator of Treasury of Mexican Love Poems,

Quotations ' Proverbs

In Writing Naked, Coleen Marks gives us personal poems with a wider resonance:

childhood and coming of age in a large, working class Irish-American family, then an

adult life of love, work, relationships, and growing older in a long and close marriage.

She is an engaging story-teller—in fact the word “stories” crops up as a motif throughout

the book, as she observes “stories...on the see saw between too simple and too complex.”

She writes about day jobs and earning a living (not often the subject of poetry), as well as

her developing feminist consciousness in a male-dominated social milieu. These firstperson

poems tell of loved ones and strangers, hardship and play, art and ardor, captured

with a down-to-earth thoughtfulness that evokes emotions from carefree (“A Room with a

View”) to deeply touching (“Sgt. Gomez,” “At Ninety-One”). Writing Naked conveys an

open-hearted yet clear-eyed optimism, and an ethical commitment to taking one’s place in

the world.

Maxine Susman Author of Gogama and Provincelands