Tea Leaves: a memoir of mothers and daughters by Janet Mason (Bella Books April 2012) is now available -- click here for more info

“There is something here for everyone who has ever loved someone else or plans to. I highly recommend “Tea Leaves” just because it is so real and so beautifully written.”–Reviews by Amos Lassen

ch eck out Janet Mason's author blog

read Janet Mason's latest piece in The Huffington Post --Chick-fil-A: What Would Gandhi Do If He Were Gay?

Hitching To Nirvana, a novel of midife and adolescence by Janet Mason is now available on-line and from bookstores

Tea Leaves: a memoir of mothers and daughters (Bella Books April 2012) is now available -- click here for more info

Janet Mason's upcoming readings and appearances

Audio poetry! Click here to hear the readings/appearances read. Download the MP3 and listen later (3 MB)

a woman alone
poems/Janet Mason

find out how to order...click here

(Cycladic Press $6 -- ISBN/ 1-882827-08-2)

I wrote these poems while traveling alone through Greece--in Athens, Delphi and the islands of Crete and Lesvos. My two main inspirations were Sappho and Odyseus Elytis, their slim volumes tucked in my backpack.

a woman alone
stands outside
washed white houses:
she is cut
into cliff; the trellises
of her roses
bloom geraniums
that inhale
as she walks by;
a woman alone
is her own
scent unfolding.

a woman alone
hears the cooing of pigeons
and the flap of wings
folding air;
she hears Cathedral bells
answering one another;
and morning light
sputtering traffic
into existence; a
woman alone is a city
awakening.

she colors her own fields
wide open with purple
and yellow bowing
to a prism of green
swept away
in a stampede
of poppies
a woman alone is
wild and red.

Click here to read the first place award winning a woman alone poems from Philadelphia Poets 2009

click here for Sapphics

Find out how to own a woman alone, click here.

click here to read commentary about Sappho in Lesbos, Greece

she is chiseled
from stone;
raising her arms
her breasts
become
small and high,
hungry
for their own kind;
a woman alone
inhabits
the sinew
of white marble

a woman alone lives
in the house
of the double ax;
she enters her own labyrinth
and comes out amazed;
she is the minotaur
the earth womb
turned to a monster;
she is her own silver thread
leading herself to the center
of the maze that is her,
a woman alone.