Appear to Dance
by Linda Kleinbub  
Cover Art by Linda Wulkan

Praise for Appear to Dance

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“Inside every torment is a reason to survive,” Linda Kleinbub writes in her new book, Appear to Dance, poems written during the Covid lockdown. After her own bout with the virus, working in her garden, reconnecting senses to her brain, giving flavor back to texture when the flavor has left, listening closer to a sparrow’s song, or practicing how to stand up straight again, these poems are accounts of daily lessons learned. Appear to Dance is a survival kit and therein lies its gift.

—Don Yorty, author of Spring Sonnets.

 

In Appear to Dance, Linda Kleinbub vividly captures the isolation, uncertainty, and necessary search for small pleasures we all experienced during the pandemic. Moving from personal to collective loss, this book abounds with poignant prayers, practical advice, and often playful lists. There is suffering, but also savoring -- flowers and music – “A rock and roll party in my garden.” To read this work reawakens a sense of gratitude and appreciation, or as she puts it at the end of one abecedarian poem, “Value the gifts of / water and earth. /  X-amine the entire picture -- / yellow sun will rise tomorrow / zebras are still black and / white.”

—Elaine Equi, author of The Intangibles.

                                                                       

 

Linda Kleinbub’s poems, in Appear to Dance, chronicle her journey through the pandemic. Her poems share her story of fatigue and worry, and how she ‘learned to carry her (my) bones’ through it all. Linda’s poems tell us of a place beyond her symptoms, and the realities of Covid, where beauty exits. Her poems are about life, where there is ‘moonlight in flower pots’, tulips ‘unearthing chlorophyll’, and where ‘a sparrow’s song fills the sky’. Appear to Dance is poetry as memoir, at its best! 

—Paula Curci Nassau County Poet Laureate.

 

Linda Kleinbub’s Appear to Dance is a journey through the pandemic through one poet’s fascinating experience. Immediate and intimate, this is a diary of quotidian life during lockdown and long Covid and it is surprisingly lively. Spring bursts through quarantine; relationships and love and music and gardens are painstakingly recalled and take on special meaning. There are current events such as riots and looting and the killing of George Floyd. Constellations dance; from her isolation, the poet yearns for her beloved, and ponders whether it is “worth dying for a good loaf of bread “? “Can anybody feel me?” she asks. As the virus rages around, the answer is a resounding “yes” as we enter into Kleinbub’s rich and vivid pandemic world. 

—Larissa Shmailo, author of Dora/Lora.

 

Those of us who survived the Covid years are grateful that such a candid soul has recorded the anxiety and claustrophobia of that global pandemic — and fashioned it into crisp, daily dispatches of good poems that will show future generations how it really felt.

—Zev Shanken, Thirty-three Poems About My Father.

 

Linda Kleinbub’s Appear to Dance is a sidelong glance back to our pandemic days beginning March 2020 and traveling through the confusion and loneliness of COVID fears.  Hopeful rays shimmer through the miasma of conflict, and awakening to the strength of nature budding.  Kleinbub shares poems rising and falling with breath begging for confinement to end, and offering the reader to join her on this journey, hands clasped in friendship and prayer.  This is a must for your poetry collection. 

—J R Turek, author of DogSpeak.   

 

 

Linda Kleinbub's Appear to Dance is a wonderfully sensitive collection of poems dealing with her journey through the deadly COVID pandemic. She writes about her extreme sickness during the heart of it, and her eventual survival. As she says: ‘…She’s healing slowly as she prays for her hospitalized friend…’ and: ‘She seeks silence, listens to the wind / In the distance an ambulance speeds by…’ Her saving grace is her love of Nature. Linda observes birds, sycamore seeds laying on the ground, and ‘…waits for the evening / when the moon is high…’ She tells the falcon to fly, and in her book she does exactly that! Appear to Dance is a carefully observed testament to that dark period, and it is an important one. Full of life, it will stand the test of time.

—Ron Kolm is a contributing editor of Sensitive Skin & author of The Bookstore Book.

 

Linda Kleinbub’s exciting new volume of verse Appear to Dance reminds me of Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s line in Spinster, “You can’t leave good weeping unfinished.” I’m not suggesting Kleinbub’s chronicle of life during the Covid epidemic is weepy; but rather that her poems always seemed poised on the edge of heartbreak, not an amorous one but the social heartbreak that comes to a speaker cut off family, gym, and, most importantly, the social activities of poetry readings and gatherings with friends, all closed off by the Covid lockdown. Heart-tugging moments abound as when, for example, the hero gives tips by phone to son when he is sick, trying to cultivate “long distance health” or when she sits like a bird among leaves in the top seats in bleachers on a deserted playing field. Reading this book, you relive those sorrowful times, re-saddening yourself with so many poignant lyrics. —Jim Feast, author of Carl Marx Private Eye.