Dreaming of Sunflowers: Museum Poems

"The Muse of Museums has found her poet in Lucille Lang Day. She has a painter's eyes, a scientist's mind and an alchemist's soul. In her museum poems-be they dedicated to art, anthropology, science or pinball-she describes the world we enter with scientific precision, paints it with colorful words, then throws in a tincture of wild imagination, memory, a drop of ancestral spirit and proclaims: 'Let there be magic!' and there is magic, in poem after poem. The shaman whose costume is preserved in a glass case rises to fly over oceans. At the Pinball Museum, with her nine-year-old grandson, we are suddenly in the company of his grandfather, 'slender and seventeen, ' playing a mean pinball. In the art museum a female Buddha dances for us in the poet's eye. Read these poems and you too will be touched by magic." - Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, author of The Little House on Stilts Remembers and The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way Lucille Lang Day is the author of eight previous poetry collections and chapbooks, including The Curvature of Blue, The Book of Answers, and Infinities. Her first collection, Self-Portrait with Hand Microscope, received the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature. She has also published a children's book, Chain Letter, and a memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story, which received a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. Her poems, short stories, and essays have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies. She earned her MFA in creative writing at San Francisco State University and her PhD in science/mathematics education at the University of California at Berkeley. The founder and director of a small press, Scarlet Tanager Books, she also served for many years as the director of the Hall of Health, an interactive museum in Berkeley.