by Sam McClellan | Apr 9, 2024 | Books |
Toni Ortner’s chapbook, Focused Light from a Distant Star, is a collection of 39 ekphrastic poems and prose poems. Most were inspired by the works “created by women in the last two centuries,” says Ortner in her Preface including Natalya Goncharova,...
by Sam McClellan | Nov 7, 2022 | Books |
Toni Ortner’s poems use a language which is simultaneously sumptuous and spare to create a detailed world woven of reality and dream, sometimes both at once. Out of what seem to be simple materials- people, animals, plants, natural landscapes and sometimes...
by Sam McClellan | Aug 29, 2022 | Books |
“In her 26th book, Blue Lyrics, Toni Ortner—- through free-verse lyrics as well as tightly crafted prose poems in which she addresses and acknowledges Picasso, Van Gogh, Brueghel, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, Adrienne Rich, and Diane Wakoski—hits all the big...
by Sam McClellan | Aug 29, 2022 | Books |
Toni Ortner’s Daybook V, Change of Season, documents the daily thoughts of the Vermont poet and writer who reflects on life in the times of COVID. Uplifting but tinted with the bleakness of the era, Change of Season, blends both poetry and prose in her diary of...
by Sam McClellan | Aug 29, 2022 | Books |
Toni Ortner is a truth teller, even when it hurts. She leaves the reader amazed at her ability to vividly describe the challenges of everyday life and the need for the imagination as a curative. Ortner takes her inspiration from Virginia Woolf ’s claim that a diary...
by Toni Ortner | 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...
by Toni Ortner | 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...
by Toni Ortner | 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,...
by Toni Ortner | 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,”...
by Toni Ortner | 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...
