How I Happened

Lou Orfanella

These poems are memoir based. The memoir process itself allows for many liberties. Experiences viewed through a lens of nostalgia, melancholy, and wistfulness have the potential to blend past, present, fantasy, and reality. They can make the abstract more concrete and vice versa. While these memories are personal, it is my hope that there is a universality herein as well.

In Utero

At what point did my brainwaves begin to function
Did I think before I was born
Did I have an awareness of my limbs and organs growing
As my cells divided
Did I dream before I experienced and what is it that makes
One event significant enough to remain forever while
So much else simply fades away
Desperately wanting to be retrieved and written about
Somewhere in my gray matter do I have memories of
Traveling toward the light
Entering the world naked and blood streaked
The beginning of how I happened

ISBN 1-59661-033-6 24 pages/$9

Back cover text:

“Lou Orfanella’s poems tumble into the mind with a foaming wave of images that memorialize his generation.”
—J. P. Briggs
author of Trickster Tales

“Orfanella’s poems combine string, vivid imagery with a genuine human strength. He has a special gift that borders on the miraculous, i.e. the ability to resurrect the past (people and all), to make it come alive and speak to us, touch our spirit, and enrich our present lives.”
—James R. Scrimgeour
author of Balloons Over Stockholm and We Are What We Have Loved

“Wonderful poems breathing fresh life into stale air.”
—Jeff Kamen
journalist, co-author of Final Warning: Averting Disaster in the New Age of Terrorism
Lou Orfanella is the author of five collections of poetry, including Composite Sketches and Summer Rising, River Flowing, and of a collection of essays on the writing process, Scenes from an Ordinary Life: Getting Naked to Explore a Writer’s Process and Possibilities. He teaches at Western Connecticut State University.