Appearances
by Gloria Oden

The sweetest insanity is love. This is a love story: Gloria Oden, now 80, her life, her loves, and the rediscovery of love. The youngest of 6 children in a church-centered African American family, Oden grew up in the same town as Lawrence Ferlinghetti and later became a close friend of Kenneth Rexroth and Marianne Moore. "Thank you for these poems and for a lifetime of keeping alive, in flames and in embers, this really, this wonderful person — yourself" — William I. Elliott, Poetry Kanto.