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’ debut 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
