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...
by Toni Ortner | 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...
by Toni Ortner | 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....
by Toni Ortner | Sep 29, 2016 | Books
In A White Page Demands Its Letters, Toni Ortner records the pain of divorce and other loss. The poetic cycle, Dream Sequence, placed here in chronological order, has a raw intensity that strikes the reader like a knife in the heart. The poet must invent a new self in...
by Toni Ortner | Oct 20, 2015 | Books
Toni Ortner lives in Putney, Vermont. She has had seventeen books published by fine small presses, fifteen of which are poetry books. If you wish to see new writing, descriptions of her books and reviews, go to vermontviews.org and look at her column Old Lady Blog....
by Toni Ortner | Sep 29, 2014 | Books
Currents We Never Dream Of by Toni Ortner was written when the poet was in her late thirties in a state of transition. The closest one might get to defining the genre would be prose poetry. This is a spiritual journey yet so much more. It explores the currents that...
by Toni Ortner | | Books, Poems
In JEOPARDY Toni Ortner explores grief and loss, and the path to acceptance, “It’s riotous enough to love. / Be my sweet morning dove. / Let go of the black cloth of mourning. / I will weave you a nest of sweet grass and sun.” “In the midst of this litany of grief”...
