Bøger af Kathleen Wheeler

Elizabeth Thornton has worked hard to get where she is in life. An only child raised by a single mother in a small Colorado town, she has risen through the ranks and sits at the top of her field. She has a great career with a top company, a townhouse in a prestigious Boston neighborhood, and all the trappings of success- everything she thought she wanted; but for some reason she hasn't found the one thing her soul most yearns for. When her mother is diagnosed with cancer, Elizabeth puts her life on hold to return to Colorado to see to her care. A recent transplant to Carbondale, Hailey Jensen is starting over in a new life of her own making, far away from the daily reminders of everything that she was and is. She is soon befriended by the local bakery owner who becomes a sort of mother figure and forces Hailey to face her demons when she suddenly collapses at work. This is the story of 3 women, whose evolving relationships with themselves and each other teach them how to be themselves, how to be brave in the face of deep potential sorrow and that love can come from surprising places and take surprising shapes. Can the bonds they forge with each other survive the cards they've been dealt?

Wheeler's poems project a multidirectional sensuality that evokes celestial contact from the vantage point of a clever pragmatic observer of life. Sacred and profane passions are infused in the body, the lover, the forest, the city and the deadening work day. Selections such as "Anchor Me" build the tension between grounding and floating, that develop throughout the work as fear and action, repression and exposure. We sense everyday sounds, sights, and smells, the ecstasy of past lives and yet to be identified lovers in our midst. Rather than resolve these tensions, where "the point and counterpoint [are] seeking a tipping point," Wheeler allows her reader to revel in this "Immaculate Chaos," the final poem and the title of the work. She reminds us to love deeply through our suffering and to trust our intuitions and desires as a way to honor the inherent spirituality in human existence.

How does one capture the delightful irony of Edith Wharton's prose or the spare lyricism of Kate Chopin's? Kathleen Wheeler challenges the reader to experiment with a more imaginative method of literary criticism in order to comprehend more fully writers of the Modernist and late Realist period. In examining the creative works of seven women writers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wheeler never lets the mystery and magic of literature be overcome by dry critical analysis. Modernist Women Writers and Narrative Art begins by evaluating how Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, and Willa Cather all engaged in an ironic critique of realism. They explored the inadequacies of this form in expressing human experience and revealed its hidden, often contradictory, assumptions. Building on the foundation that Wharton, Chopin, and Cather established, Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield, Stevie Smith, and Jane Bowles brought literature into the era we now consider modernism. Drawing on insights from feminist theory, deconstructionism and revisions of new historicism, Kathleen Wheeler reveals a literary tradition rich in narrative strategy and stylistic sophistication.