Pauline Findlay
Dysfunction:
A Play on Words in the Familiar
Pauline Findlay
Cover Art by Linda Wulkan
From the Author
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A word is like a music note on a blank page, but when surrounded by other notes, you compose music. A symphonic rapture that can move one to multitudes of emotions. This is the way I see words when I write. It’s a beautiful response to any emotion that I desire to evoke from the reader. Music, like the ocean, has a certain level of fluidity. It can leave you breathless, raging, empathetic, and with a feeling of sheer joy. These two extraordinary forces will live beyond you and me and will be just as riveting to generations long after we have exited this planet.
Dysfunction: A Play on Words in the Familiar has lived with me for years, and so has the subject matter.
So many things came to mind as I embarked upon a journey that was filled with a plethora of pervasive thoughts. For instance, normality, what one considers normal another may consider dysfunctional. In our humanness, personal belief systems, authoritativeness, judgmental thresholds of right and wrong leave a lot of open topics for the poet to explore. Is there a blueprint to living, or a basic baseline for compassion and common courtesy? Are we displaying tolerance or magnanimity? Are we standers of taciturnity of silence, glaring with opinionated eyes, surmising the total with only our credence? Are social issues an exposition to finding real resolution, or is the sophistication of simplicity now becoming bromidic and boring?
I dared to tamper with hypocrisies. But most of all, I sat in self-introspection. I too must question my actions, behaviors, adequacy of intellect, emotions, and hypocrisies. I’ve been willing to challenge and expose myself with pen and paper, only to find out that I’m human, and my frailties have not made me much better than anyone else. In my own words, I see the continually evolving state of my work. Then I ask, “Is there normalcy in my view and my thought?” Where are the answers? Who has them?
Linda Wulkan
Praise for Dysfunction: A Play on Words in the Familiar
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To read Pauline Findlay’s words is to feel the thunder of past and present through the hearts of silenced voices. She writes, “I have built and rebuilt my bones time and again,” and indeed she does in every piece. Pauline gives her voices footing with which to step from the shadows and invites us, readers, to peer around the darkness to the bigger story. The poet asks us, “How did I become ordinary?” The answer dear poet is “You didn’t, and neither did the inner and outer lives of the voices you conjure.” Pauline devours syllables with sound and rhythm…with thunder.
—Lynn Canzano Pyfer, Cofounder of Watershed Collaborative.
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Ms. Findlay’s poems introduce us to individuals inhabiting a world that is cruel, desolate, lonely, unforgiving, and seemingly hopeless Their only hope comes from resilience, inner strength, and an indomitable will to not only survive but triumph. Ms. Findlay offers small golden nuggets of hope that glimmer through the darkness and suggests the possibility of salvation and redemption. Her poems are built on words of such strength and beauty that you quickly become totally immersed in this world she’s created making it a very intense and exhilarating experience.
—Phillip Giambri, Author of Good Boy, Bad Boy, a Better Man.
In Findlay’s abundant new collection, we travel to the cosmos, to hells both historical and of our own design, and to the edges of promise. The poems are big, enveloping but not exhaustive. The stakes often feel like nothing less than life or death, our own salvation hangs in the balance, and yet she assures us that beauty blossoms from a ravaged landscape. A breathtaking vitality is at work here.
—Katherine Rowland, Author of The Pleasure Gap.
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Dysfunction, a poetic force. Ms. Findlay crashes through her palatable fear to examine the prism of human experience, especially as a woman in all her various roles. The collected works resonate with the timbre of a strong voice examining all her limitations and all her strengths. There’s no disguising pain in the poems, but her melodic illustration of hope in beautifully paced rhyme and rhythm floats to the surface. It is personally powerful and beautifully expressed.
—Thomas Pryor, I Hate The Dallas Cowboys: Tales of a Scrappy New York Boyhood.
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Pauline Findlay’s poetry is eye-opening, in that it depicts great imagery and stretches one’s vocabulary. If you like an enjoyable challenge, she nails it right on the head.
—Geo Derice - Author of The Thirst is Real and Geo’s Gems.
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These visceral poems from Pauline Findlay spring from a fierce and deep place in the author’s life and heart. A powerful collection that is arresting, evocative, and won’t leave you. —Chelsea Miller, The New Press.