Spelling the World Backwards
by Lois Marie Harrod

Palanquin Press of the University of South Carolina Aiken has just published New Jersey poet/teacher Lois Marie Harrod's Spelling the World Backwards, a poignant account of a father dying from Alzheimer's disease.

Harrod, who teaches English at Voorhees High School in Glen Gardner, NJ, and who is Supervisor of Creative Writing at the New Jersey Governor's School of the Arts at The College of New Jersey in Ewing, began the book in l992 when her father's Alzheimer's disease was first diagnosed. Harrod's poems explore the world that the father can no longer explore, so that the book fleshes not only a family coping with an Alzheimer's victim, but the past which the victim can no longer recover. Her brave and honest narratives incorporate sermon and psalm, elegy and language play.

Harrod is the author of three previous volumes of poetry, Every Twinge a Verdict (Belle Mead Press, l987), Crazy Alice (Belle Mead Press 1991 and l999), and Part of the Deeper Sea (Palanquin Press, l997) as well as two chapbooks, Green Snake Riding (New Spirit Press, l994) and This is Story You Already Know (Palanquin Press, l999).

Palanquin Press
University of South Carolina-Aiken
471 University Drive, Aiken, SC 29801
ISBN 1-891508-06-7    $12 (paper), $18 (cloth)
Available at amazon.com