Marisa Crawford

When you French-kissed the class president on the school trip to Boston and we wore yellow feathers in our hair, and I dropped my beaded red velour bag into the harbor, it opened up a crack of light for me."
-- from 8th Grade Hippie Chick

This chapbook of inter connected prose poems calls on the ghosts of memory and youth, unveiling the pain and joy of friendship and young love. Each poem captures a moment with more fluidity than a photograph and opens up the wounds and intimacies of friendship with all it's music and play and clothing and crushes.

Marisa draws on the small things ("I was wearing a silver ring that said, 'Imagine' on it."), on the little details ("A closet full of Beatles shirts. Tie-dye. A hot pink aura.") to open up aches and joys. Presented in short paragraphs of text, her words flow over one another to reveal the wider inner world of being young girls. Reading this book, I found myself nostalgic for days and ways that were not my own, longing for a youth that was at once so similar and yet vastly different from my own.

I adore this little stitched book as much as I adored Marisa's first collection of poems, The Haunted House, which touches on similar themes. I may be biased, since I know Marisa from when we worked at Aunt Lute Books together and I consider her a friend. But she has such a unique voice and her words pluck a cord inside me and resonate with my inner girlhood, and I can't wait to read more of her work. I wish her many future successes.… (mehr)

Marissa Crawford presents a collection of prose poems deeply imbued with adolescent girlhood. There's a the same sense mixed of delight and unease and wonder when reading the women of Marissa's poetry, as there would be in encountering a ghost for the first time. Pop culture slips into the poetry as easily as references to Emily Dickenson, who is really a pop culture princess and awkward adolescent herself.

I was continually surprised reading through these poems, first picking them at random, and then starting from the beginning and reading through to the end. The poetry here incorporates simple sentences piled on top of one another into a complex web, which shows how nothing ever goes away, but continues to haunt us. I really, really love this book, and love that I own it and can return to it again and again.

As a final note, I should point out that I am potentially biased here, because I know Marissa personally. We used to work together. Though I'm not prone to raving about something just because my friend did it, I'm mentioning it nevertheless. So, if you don't trust my opinion, you can always read
this review over at the Examiner.com - San Francisco.… (mehr)

The 500+ pages of Graham Rossiter and Marisa Crawford’s book "Reasons for Living" are impressive. The book is both a practical reference book for everything to with teaching ‘meaning, identity and spirituality’ in the Australian context, and an overall rationale for teaching about religion etc across the schooling systems.

Its strength is the clear-eyed view it offers on Catholic education, which Graham and Marisa obviously know best. But the starting point of the book is what all young people are looking for, not just those that attend Catholic schools, so its spells out clearly what is possible in public schools under present conditions and how teachers might legitimately extend their teaching.

Those who know Graham Rossiter will know the clarity of his writing about RE, and this book brings together much of the extended research he has done over the years. I am hoping, however, that the huge range of this book does not signal that this is Graham’s last contribution to RE: he has plenty more to offer.

Publisher's summary: http://shop.acer.edu.au/acer-shop/product/0864316135… (mehr)