Astoria

Outstanding compilation of engaging and lyrical poetic rhetoric . . . With a lyrically enraptured worksmithing, Morling presents her most insightful, artistic, and sensuously flowing poetry yet.

Trains . . . and big cities . . . the solitariness of individual consciousness, and time speeding up or collapsing, and the mystery of other people with other lives, as if it were a sort of Buddhist allegory of the transcience of things and the wonder of ourselves, our single, instantaneous awareness. I thought of this reading Ocean Avenue, by Malena Morling, which captures these feelings in a very pure way.

Malena Morling's Astoria is truly a wondrous book. Her poems possess a concreteness and images that become a vivid transparency. The poems are meditations that belong to the real world without leaving it. People and places make bridges to each other. The reader is turned to him-or-her-self. Every time I have reread Astoria, I feel I am experiencing the poems for almost the first time. The poems are constant enthusiasms, at work with intuitions from the heart and the mind and the world.

Malena Morling is a writer who is not afraid to feel or imagine and who has the exceptional talent required to make an original voice.

There is something exquisite in Morling's genuine pondering. In 'Astoria,' she moves through the city and the imagination with great speed and yet a cautious and watchful eye. Her keen observations make her work fresh and striking.