Dancing Light Sings

 Reviews

   "I like the world you create for us, the bellbirds, the hawthorn flower, skeletons of extinct fish, and all the emotions you lay bare. Many of them are sobering and make the reader stop and reflect...."

Beth Peoch, France

   "Your lyrics make me happy... The expression is at the same time clear, poetic and inspiring, releasing in the reader his assimilable (archetypal?) experiences... You are a master writer of the last line - always with surprising depth and maturity, never lamenting, sentimental or stereotyped."

Hans Wirz, Basle

   "I felt every page - stabbing. direct and beautifully woven.... so please don't put the pen down, carry on giving us such rich, poignant and direct poetry..."

Anne Hoskin, Lausanne

Transition

 
   Transition was a born from a desire to give poetic form to inner chaos. Thirty two poems trace my path from the child who lost her roots to the woman who retrieved them from within herself. These poems have been framed with an introduction by Wallis Wilde Menozzi, a cosmopolitan poet, who generously held out her hand to guide me.

 Reviews

   “I am blown away by how powerful this little book is. How important it is for us to put our work into a finished form! I’m inspired and awed. I will keep it close at hand and savor it bit by bit with my morning coffee.”

Mary Parlange  (Writer, translator –  www.gydle.ch/blog)

“Jo Ann Hansen Rasch’s poems breathe a longing to enter into an inheritance she intuits is hers, a home, a birthright – culturally, linguistically, poetically. The poems are the arresting transcript of her attempt to put that longing into words – and it is a story that is only beginning.”

Michael Hulse  (Poet, editor, translator – www.contemporarywriters.com)

   “Jo Ann Hansen Rasch has crafted a beautiful book of poetry. Her poems take us from New Zealand on an immigrant ship to the promised land. That promise she finds in herself. Hence the title of this first collection. Transition. The poems are alive, visual, generous. They trace the poet’s path with lyricism and uncensored images, leaving the reader with a desire for more.”

Susan Tiberghien (Writer, teacher – www.susantiberghien.com)

   “Dream the madness of poetry … Jo Ann Hansen Rasch’s dazzling use of words fills both mind and heart, grounding us in what may well be the antidote to true madness: the terra firma of the creative vision.”

Mary Anna Barbey (Writer, journalist – https://www.maryanna-barbey.com).

Blowing Feathers

A family memoir :

   A memoir in the voice of my mother, Karen Hansen. It was inspired by diaries and stories written on hundreds of bits of paper found after her death in 2000.

   Blowing Feathers is for sale on Amazon, and in Switzerland in the following bookshops.

• Books Books Books, Lausanne

• Payot, Lausanne

• OffTheShelf, Geneva

• Bergli Books, Basle

Reviews

   “I have just finished your really rather astonishing, even shocking, book, and write to congratulate you on an amazing piece of ventriloquism. …You have managed to catch your mother’s anger and madness as well as her acuity of vision and passion for the earth.”

Nicholas Rankin (Journalist, Dead Man’s Chest, Telegram from Guernica)

   “New Zealand is Karen Hansen’s birthplace and she got heavily infused in Maori culture with her father’s encouragement. Most of the family were non-violent and pacifists who were appalled by the violence in the world. This account spans seven generations and reads as an important documentary of the times past, in New Zealand and elsewhere. This book is a compelling, if not essential read.”

Trevor Reeves ( Southern Ocean Review, Issue 48, July 12th 2008)

    “Congratulations! Huzza! Huzza! … for Blowing Feathers. It is of huge importance to embark and to complete the journey of “telling.” You have done it beautifully… Yes, the act of transformation does require this Herculean telling.

Hannelore Hahn (Founder & Executive Director of International Women’s Writing Guild)

    “I read your book with pleasure, excitement, unable to turn the light out at night. It is a memoir of the times, of your mother, and a tribute to you to have put it all together so that it is seamlessly hers. I have no idea how many thousands of bits of paper you rearranged and stitched together, because the flow is natural as though she had written it herself.”

Anna Wirz-Justice (Professor Emeritus, Centre for Chronobiology, Basle, Switzerland)

   “I was impressed and moved, and very sorry to come to the end of Blowing Feathers so soon after starting it, and I am still haunted by its bittersweet, distressing perception of the brevity of life, its pervading feeling of guilt and frustration at not being in several places at the same time. This magnificent short-cut of your errant family’s nomadic life propels the reader through the cardinal stages of existence, and illustrates so well the cruel necessity of betrayals and the impossible balance between bonds and detachment, selfishness and generosity that our deepest need for self-fulfilment forces us to strike.”

Philippe Janin, (from a treasured letter written to me by a reader)