(Updated at 8:19am, 05-23-11)
Former area resident Jeff Fearnside won a poetry chapbook competition sponsored by the Standing Rock
Cultural Arts in Kent.
As a result the Kent arts organization has published a chapbook of his poetry “Lake and Other Poems of
Love in a Foreign Land.”
The book, which is available at Grounds for Thought, 174 S. Main St.,
Bowling Green, features verse about Fearnside’s four years living in the
Central Asia, both in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
He went first as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English and then as manager of a graduate fellowship
program.
While there he met his wife, Valentina. Fearnside writes of he and his wife:
“We will always remember that love chooses us;
“we don’t choose the place of love.”
The poems in “Lake” are candid descriptions of life in a strange culture
that’s at once fascinating and alienating. The characters in his poems
are reeling in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union,
uncertain if their new freedoms are better than the certainties of the
old regime.
The scenes show how traditional life collides with the new global order.
One poem contrasts sharing vodka to the din of techno music and being
served a cup of chai by a hostess, longing all the while for a shot of
whiskey.
Fearnside graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Writing from Bowling
Green State University, and later earned his Master of Fine Arts from
Eastern Washington University.
He lives in Prescott, Ariz., and teaches writing and literature at Prescott College.
He also has written two prose manuscripts “Silk Road Tales,” accounts of
his travels in Asia, and “Making Love While Levitating Three Feet in
the Air,” a short story collection.