In Dear Descendent, Carol Masters draws upon her life as an activist and her love of the natural world to fashion thoughtful overlays and wry juxtapositions that can delight the senses [and] prick the conscience…

—John Toren Nodin


Cover Image by Michael Bayly

A new collection of poetry by activist Carol Masters, author of Marv Davidov’s biography You Can’t Do That: Marv Davidov, Nonviolent Revolutionary.

Women Against Military Madness Newsletter Vol. 37 No. 4.

In Dear Descendent, Carol Masters draws upon her life as an activist and her love of the natural world to fashion thoughtful overlays and wry juxtapositions that can delight the senses or prick the conscience—often both at once. A master of metaphor, yet she doesn’t shy away from an occasional grand (and whimsical) metaphysical statement: Everything is Made of Everything.
There are prison cells and fields of flowers—even her straightforward descriptions of the moon demonstrate that something new and evocative can still be found in its age-old countenance. Gratitude and grief commingle in her poems about aging and loved ones lost. Topping it all off is an intermittently surreal and sometimes almost crazy freedom in the use of images. In the poem “Fly Ball,” for example, sports, physics, and the Second Coming converge as the sacrifice fly approaches the mitt. (Apollinaire would have approved.) The words flow freely, musically, from the page, ensuring that Masters’ voice is one that her descendents—and ours—will want to listen to.

A member of the Women Against Military Madness Newsletter Committee, Carol Masters grew up in Chicago and has lived and worked in Kansas, Texas, and Minnesota. Her children and friends inspired her to actions for peace (with the Honeywell Project and Women Against Military Madness), and in environmental movements. She served useful time in jail after being arrested for civil disobedience in nonviolent protests of nuclear weapons. A number of the poems in this collection, including “jail poems”, reflect her social conscience concerns.

Masters is a recipient of a Loft Mentor Series Award, Loft-McKnight fellowship, Minnesota State Arts Board fellowship, and Minnesota Voices Project award for The Peace Terrorist (short stories) (New Rivers Press, 1993). Her biography You Can’t Do That: Marv Davidov, Nonviolent Revolutionary was published by Nodin Press in 2009, and was selected as a finalist for a Midwest Independent Publishers Award.

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Featured image: Wildflower photo by Lucia Wilkes Smith

Excerpt: Masters charges each one of us to make a difference.  

Truth is not fake news.  Justice is not fake news. Learn more about and donate to Rise Up Times now and share articles widelyThe people, Yes!

The contents of Rise Up Times do not necessarily reflect the views of the editor. Articles are chosen for republication based on the interest of our readers. Rise Up Times republishes articles from a number of other independent news sources as well as original articles and stories.

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By Published On: October 8th, 2019Comments Off on Announcing “Dear Descendent,” Poetry of wonder and wit for our time, provocative, challenging, wry, wise and tender…

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