On Sunday, October 17, Baton Rouge Gallery’s Sundays@4 series is honored to welcome Ellen Aronofsky Cole, who will be presenting her newest works from “Notes from the Dry County.”
As with all Sundays@4 presentations, this event is free and open for all to enjoy.
Ellen Aronofsky Cole with “Notes from the Dry County”
What if your death was born with you when you were born, your shadow twin, and walks around with you wherever you go, to be released only when you die? What if fear mice run down your spine in the hospital, and then make a movie where the highlights of your life are left on the cutting room floor? What if your spirit drifts north on prevailing winds to Newfoundland, or hangs around in the clouds above Penobscot Bay? In Notes from the Dry Country poet Ellen Aronofsky Cole writes about the end of life in poems that draw on myth, fairytales, fantasy, popular culture, and brutal reality. In this world Henry the VII might shop at K-Mart for a wife, and an angel might appear in your back yard disguised as a T-Rex and dispatch your nephew and niece.
In this collection Cole chronicles her experiences as a patient suffering from a rare blood cancer that she was not expected to survive, the bone marrow transplant that saved her life, and then broadens her focus to include the depression, anxiety, and an inescapable sense of vulnerability in this world that her experiences as a cancer survivor and a woman have left her. She also writes movingly about her joy in her husband and daughters, and how her family and dearest friends have drawn her back from despair.
Cole’s poems are fast moving and vivid, using forms that include classic blues, sonnets, dramatic monologues, prose poems, and free verse. Her poems morph and surprise, reality merges with dreams in a Chagallian collage of unexpected images, tenderness, humor, and the dark corners of the human soul.
Ellen Aronofsky Cole is a poet, actress, puppeteer, and teaching artist. She’s a medical actress who role plays with medical students to help them hone their diagnostic and interpersonal skills. Her publications include Notes from the Dry Country, published by Mayapple Press in 2019, and a chapbook, Prognosis, published by Finishing Line Press in 2011. Her work has been included in two anthologies, poem, home, published by Paper Kite Press, and Sealskins and Tailfins, an Anthology of Water Lore, published in the U.K. by Three Drops Press. Her poems have also appeared in The Fledgling Rag, The Little Patuxent Review, The Potomac Review, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Washington Post Magazine, Bogg: A Journal of Contemporary Writing, District Lines, Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine, the website arspoetica.com, and other journals. Her article “My Life as a (Fake) Patient,” was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Ellen lives in Silver Spring, Maryland with her husband Brian, and a small, feisty parrot named Haiku