Seeking the Pink

In Seeking the Pink, Liana Kapelke-Dale explores the pleasures, dreams, quests, and fears of the "young so young and in full Technicolor." Using odes, dramatic monologues, haiku, ghazals, villanelles, collages, and lyrics, Kapelke-Dale interrogates and reanimates old myths. In these poems, Eve wears dreadlocks and Birkenstocks. Adam is her "boy toy." Kapelke-Dale's poems are often sensual and sometimes humorous, such as "Absent Orgasm." There are many pleasures in these image and sound-drenched poems where a pink color scheme acts as a cohesive device, where "Your love is not soap opera / it can be believed," and where the waning moon is "like a delicate gilded saucer or / the last thin slice of an orange rind."

-Susan Firer, former Milwaukee Poet Laureate and Adjunct Associate Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Kapelke-Dale's dynamic observations weave tightly around otherwise threadbare archetypes - twisting a warm mist of sensuality among icons from Lilith to Hepburn and Hekate to Curie. Beneath their blushing surface, these poems bring grotesque beauty and graceful fragility to each line of the collection. Kapelke-Dale's poems excavate ecstatic fumbles and deceptive adorations - misshapen moments, but tangible and universal.

-Bill Ripley, Editor of Another New Calligraphy

Seeking the Pink is visceral, playful, and sensual. Liana Kapelke-Dale is a master at being both playful and haunting at the same time, and her poetry pulls us inside her rich universes. Sexy, enchanting, and fresh - I loved Seeking the Pink and Kapelke-Dale's deft skill as she explores the delicious agony and ecstasy of being alive and wanting more.

-Jessica Pan, Author of Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come and Co-Author of Graduates in Wonderland