Strike Out

by | | Poems

Strike Out The man in the pale brown linen suit struts across the room. He scratches his head and lights a Marlboro cigarette.It is so warm he removes his jacket.He is surrounded by maps and charts and lines and screens. His job is statistical analysis, and he has an...

It was six am

by | | Poems

It was six am Two men in dirty overalls were digging a hole. They air was cold. One man smoked a cigarette; the other sipped coffee from a paper cup. The men dug. They stopped and peered into the hole. They stopped and dug again. It was Sunday. Children ran around the...

You must walk

by | | Poems

You must walk even when you step over severed heads and hands. Don’t be an idiot throw out the orange pills weep for the dead. Look at the Real Estate section of the papers at homes worth millions of dollars and the six caret diamond rings look at the high rise...
Daybook III: Morning is Long Since Gone

Daybook III: Morning is Long Since Gone

by | Aug 2, 2020 | Books

Toni Ortner’s Daybook III, Morning Is Long Since Gone infuses her inner life’s dreamscape, her singing tree with realities that scream over the land. Ortner’s surreal meditations in corridors persistent with memory evoke a world of redemption shattered in the ashes of...
Daybook II

Daybook II

by | Jul 14, 2020 | Books

Prose poems on memory, inner and outer landscapes, musings of all kinds, lyrical but rooted in the present tense, interwoven with observations, mysterious thresholds between reality and the imagination, even imagination as reality, with a blending of past present and...
Daybook I

Daybook I

by | Aug 25, 2019 | Books

From the Back Cover The writing in Toni Ortner’s Daybook I is lyrical but rooted in present tense, observations deeply felt. It consists of spiritual musings, political musings, musings about Life. The writing is unselfconscious, but finely hewn. Many of the passages,...
End Rhymes for End Times

End Rhymes for End Times

by | Oct 25, 2018 | Books

In End Rhymes for End Times Toni Ortner uses a wide variety of genres to dazzle the reader. She addresses the urgent issues of our times, history, and visions of the future. In “Lucid Dream” a survivor of the Apocalypse speaks. “Night Prayers,”...
Giving Myself Over to J.S. Bach

Giving Myself Over to J.S. Bach

by | Jul 6, 2018 | Books

In Toni Ortner’s Giving Myself Over to J.S. Bach, intensely lyrical poems interweave grief and love (sexual, family, even love of a pet) The voice of the poems is intimate, consistent, fluid and musical as the poems move among the different topics, tied together by...
Fractured Woman

Fractured Woman

by | May 6, 2018 | Books

Fractured Woman by Toni Ortner utilizes the prose poem to confront the urgent social, political and environmental events of our times. In “Report on Easter Sunday from the Third Planet from the Sun” the writer responds to the devastation caused by climate...
Writing Shiva

Writing Shiva

by | Sep 25, 2017 | Books

Writing Shiva is a fast-moving, drily humorous memoir about growing up as a Jewish girl during World War II in Woodmere, Long Island where the struggle to assimilate contrasts with the deep family ties and cultural roots that even illness and death cannot sever....