Windows into the Soul of the Raven Master

WILMINGTON, N.C. - Aug. 23, 2013 - PRLog -- Wilmington, NC - Andrea Bates’s second chapbook of poems, The Graveyard Sonnets, conjures the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe, through the perspective of the Poe Toaster, a mysterious, anonymous figure who, for nearly 50 years, left a half-filled bottle of cognac and three roses at Poe’s grave on The Raven Master’s birthday.

 

“These beautifully-paced windows into the soul of the Raven Master have a meticulous and haunting music,” writes poet Keith Flynn, author of Colony Collapse Disorder. The Graveyard Sonnets, he continues, “...underscore the mysteries that allow us to live, where the finest dreaming is nursed in darkness, where ‘stars are wishes that never died.’ Andrea Bates has managed to straddle both light and darkness like a shadowy toreador, giving no quarter, and asking for none in return.”

 

“These poems of Andrea Bates invite readers to enter a world of elegance and mystery, filled with beauty and lush language. Yet in this beauty and mystery there is darkness, too, and The Graveyard Sonnets offers us the dangerous thrill of recognizing the dark, and finding in it—ourselves,” says writer Lowell Mick White, author of Professed and That Demon Life.

 

The book costs $12, with $2.49 for shipping, and can be ordered from the publisher’s website: www.finishinglinepress.com. 

 

Andrea Bates is a poet and writer whose first chapbook of poems, Origami Heart, was published by Toadlily Press in 2010. As a grand prize winner of the Dancing Poetry Contest, Bates’s poetry will be choreographed by a professional dance troupe and presented at the San Francisco Legion of Honor Museum in September 2013. Her work has won numerous prizes, including the 2012 Linda Hodge Bromberg Literary Award from Quiddity Magazine’s Editorial Board for the poem “For Those Who Have Given up on Fire.” Her work has appeared in journals such as Calliope, The Comstock Review, and Evening Street and has been published in the United Kingdom and France as well. More information can be found at her website:  www.lyricalchemistry.com