For me, each poem to suggest a universal, despite each poem coming out of personal limited experience. I've always believed that someone out there will identify with the subject matter-the more broad-minded the reader the broader the identification.

Lifes not a cloud of hodgepodge, but a sparkle of connections and reconnections disparate in appearance. Theres not a noun that fits. Not one cloud', sparkle, not one verb, adjective or noun that covers it because this thread of being is always changing its appearance. So we write. Differing poems, differing themes. But all one chain of links of different sizes and shapes: variations on a theme. One long metaphor for being-ness connected by causes subtle and apparent, immediate and easy to trace or long back and untraceable. With not one single word to take it all in, to describe it, name it, it is an appearance, a going-on. A perpetual ongoing. Also something to see through, to be comforted by when it looks like a cause for suffering, something to enjoy when it does not. It is lists of inadequate words and findings, of gradualness leading to suddenness, of the invisible to visible. Its everything. So we write about everything.

When Arlene Corwin is not thinking about music, yoga, our times and culture, God, love relationships, baths, coffee, time or science, she makes it a practice to write about something in nature - just to keep her poetic mind in trim. It usually begins with a simple observation a siting perhaps. Then, being the person she is, the siting suggests, evokes, implies expands. You could call it a meditation on nature in its many forms nature, including her own. Circling Round Nature has as wide a scope as has nature, the opportunities for observations and reactions diverse, endless. Nature is the flattened frog on the road, the mushroom, the plasticized face, the weather, cycles involved in everything: all the forces controlling the physical world. The result has become a mix of of 269 minutely observed, moving, thought provoking but colloquial and often downright funny poems. Written over a period of some 60 odd years, they continue to be written and collected right up to the minute of publication. After many years of practicing the poet's craft, Arlene Corwin, has honed her skills so that many -- almost any -- observation prompts her to poetry. Her poetry is clear and straightforward. The words on the page are as willowy and lithe as if they, like their author, were an experienced and accomplished yoga practitioner. But, better than that, Arlene is also a lifelong jazz musician and brings to her poetry a sensitivity to sound, line and rhythm and that is always musical. Like any lifelong meditator, she brings as well, insights -- not in a ponderous tone of voice but simply, with keen observation and sensitivity. These are poems to read and reread and savor as you would a recording of a good jazz set. - June Calendar

"Generally speaking, my collections 'circle' around something, providing me with a wide berth for treatment. So with the exception of the few things of which I have more certainty, as in my collections A Sense of The Ridiculous' or I Is Always You Is Me.--certainties which don't need a prefix verb, the subject of woman demands circling around it. 'Woman' means half the planetary population. I would hope to reach all ages but I suspect that this particular collection will speak most to the mature woman, the woman who has begun to notice her aging processes." As in To The Child Mystic (Authorhouse), Circling Round Woman is an unintentional memoir-cum-instruction book in poetic form: sharply observational, pragmatic, personal; nonchalantly, funnily and unscientifically scientific. Women friends of the author have commented that some of the poems have changed their lives, they being able to identify themselves with the theme. "When you can identify with a thing, you feel its universality and you feel accepted", say Ms Corwin. Circling Round Woman is concrete; easy reading, deep reading; philosophical and playful all at once. Circling Round Woman makes you laugh, cry and remember. It reminds you of who you are and what you are becoming.

This isnt just a collection about time. These are thoughts about wrinkles, birthdays, tick-tocking minutes, death, illusion and illusions. This circles around time and Time. The all-embracing.

At once darkly comedic and moving, this witty exploration of female friendship, envy, and misguided ambition by the author of the number-one bestseller Drowning Ruth, deliciously satirizes the desire to shine in the world. In All is Vanity, Margaret and Letty, best friends since childhood and now living on opposite coasts, reach their mid-thirties and begin to chafe at their sense that they are not where they ought to be in life. Margaret, driven and overconfident, decides the best way to rectify this is to quit her job and whip out a literary tour de force. Frustrated almost immediately and humiliated at every turn, Margaret turns to Letty for support. But as Letty, a stay-at-home mother of four, begins to feel pressured to make a good showing in the upper-middle-class Los Angeles society into which her husband’s new job has thrust her, Margaret sees a plot unfolding that’s better than anything she could make up. Desperate to finish her book and against her better nature, she pushes Letty to take greater and greater risks, and secretly steals her friend’s stories as fast as she can live them. Hungry for the world’s regard, Margaret rashly sacrifices one of the things most precious to her, until the novel’s suspenseful conclusion shows her the terrible consequences of her betrayal. Widely celebrated for her debut novel, Drowning Ruth, Christina Schwarz once again proves herself to be a writer of remarkable depth and range. Like Drowning Ruth, All is Vanity probes into the mysteries of the human heart and uncovers the passions that drive ordinary people to break the rules in pursuit of their own desires.

Arlene Corwin believes in God – calls herself ‘God centered’. What does that mean? A first cause embodying all realities: reality in a nutshell in which all opposites resolve, God – one energy, conscious, streaming light, ending in light, soundless, without gender, absolute (all else being relative). It is ‘the only quest worth the thinking about’, the devoting to’. God doesn’t do. God doesn’t have to. Still, there’s doing done; endless forming, endless creating, for which there is nature. God Book is a collection of reflections, analyses, insights, small revelations. Ms Corwin: “God Book is written about the most mesmerizing, engrossing non-thing ever: the many aspects of a subject irresistible and endlessly interesting.” Arlene Corwin was born in Brooklyn, New York, November 8, 1934. A graduate of New York’s High School of Music & Art and Hofstra University, she is a professional jazz singer/pianist and author of 12 previous books. Her writing desk looks out on deer, lingon- and blueberry bushes, pine, fir, birch and one struggling oak. The living room is meters from the lake Stora Härsjön (pronounced hairsheun); the kitchen sees feeding birds, forest mice, squirrels, an old stone wall, boulders in the garden left there when the Ice Age retreated 10.000 years ago and, to make the wild civilized, flowers.