Canadian poet Natasha Head (The Tashtoo Parlour and, along with Roger Allen Baut, The Creative Nexus™) is the author of three poetry collections.

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Natasha says she …

“has been weaving words since I was but a wee lass running with crayons and scribblers …”

… and she continues with her poems online along with Running With Crayons, her whimsical art

Natasha’s debut poetry collection was Nothing Left to Loose (Winter Goose Publishing, 2012)  It was a Pushcart Prize nominee. A year later – almost to the day – Pulse (Winter Goose Publishing, 2013) was launched, the second of her three collections. Natasha’s third collection is Birthing Inadequacy (Lulu, 2014).

Nothing Left to Lose is a collection of self-contained poems that tell the author’s personal story of everyday difficulties, disillusionment, and disappointment to which we can all relate. Ultimately it is about trial and transformation, which is the essential theme of both books.

Trapped between what was, what
is …no movement; fear
holds me motionless.

All directions equal no choice, as
fear gives way to chaos …
enslavement.

What needs to be done, I
don’t want to do, my thoughts
constant, my nightmares

real, feeling force, breaking
pressure, resisting to the point
of stagnation

Static, Natasha Head in Nothing Left to Lose

Pulse is a short epic, a narrative stream of poems that together form a modern-day odyssey of a family caught in a web of prostitution and abandonment, alcohol and drugs, delusion and deceit. When the worst happens to the young woman who is central to the story she is wrapped in silence … at first unchosen and then embraced … In this silence appears the potential for her to reinvent herself. She is being tested. Will she answer the call to transformation?

Pulse is a dramatic fiction, but I didn’t find it melodramatic or manipulative, which it could have been in hands less skilled than Natasha’s. The poems here are lucid and direct. The language is plain and mostly understated, interesting in its relative coolness juxtaposed against the girl’s grit as it unfolds.

There is nothing worse
than waiting in the dark,
no distraction,
alone.
Mother trying her best
and she
ducked low
in the furthest corner
of a forgotten closet
where she was safe to shine the flashlight
on ancient magazines
and little golden books
where she would realize
there was no such thing as fairy tales,
and princes never stayed.”

Sal, Natasha Head in Pulse

© 2016, review, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved; portrait, cover art, and poems, Natasha Head/Winter Goose Publishing, all rights reserved ~ used here with permission