ABOUT EILEEN
Eileen Malone grew up in England, Ireland and Australia and lives in the coastal fog at the edge of the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband Bob, three dogs, two parakeets, and one cat (all rescues). She founded and directed the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition, an annual writing contest that ran for 30 years before sunsetting in 2023 .A voting member of the Northern California Book Reviewers Awards, Eileen is a mental health activist, host and co-producer of an Access San Francisco Channel 29 television interview show, and a former teacher and coordinator for California Poets in the Schools and California's community colleges.
Eileen is the author of The Complete Guide to Writers Groups, Conferences and Workshops (Wiley), the award-winning collection Letters with Taloned Claws (Poet’s Corner Press), and poetry books: I Should Have Given Them Water (Ragged Sky Press) as well as It Could Be Me, Although Unsure (Kelsay Press). Her poetry and stories have been published in over 500 literary journals and anthologies, many of which have earned prizes and citations, including four Pushcart nominations. She is a former Poet Laureate of Broadmoor Village.
praise for eileen's work
As I read Eileen Malone’s new collection, “It Could Be Me, Although Unsure,” smoke blankets the Bay Area, landmarks have disappeared into the haze. Where’s the Golden Gate Bridge? Where’s Mount Tam? People stroll along sidewalks in surgical masks. It’s strange and surreal. But reading this bright red book—a striking painting titled “Fire Girl” graces the cover—both grounds me and lifts me. The smoke clears. I find strength and wisdom here. All the elements appear in these poems: fire, water, sky, earth. These poems wrestle with the complexities, contradictions, and beauties of humanity. A veterans collects bits of shrapnel on a beach. A serial pen pal declines marriage proposals from prison inmates. A girl leaves dishes in the sink to go to her flying lessons. Tourists near a nuclear power plant wonder about birds hiding in radioactive trees. Some of my favorite poems illuminate these lives: a glassblower, a harpist, a horseback rider, a construction worker—all women, by the way—and a whale watching guy, a fisherman on a pier, people flying home “ragged and exhausted” after leaving an ashram. Malone writes with deep empathy and wry wit. She observes and invents so shrewdly it’s next to impossible to tell which predominates in each poem. For that, and so much more, I am grateful. What a superb book.
--Kathleen McClung, poet and creative writing instructor, Skyline College
Poignant, deep, beautiful poems from these three amazing, seasoned, soul-making poets. This is a collection to nourish us in these difficult times. Brava! --Lynne Barnes, poet
I'm in awe of Eileen Malone. Her deep intelligence and boundless curiosity and compassion shine throughout this wonderfully complex, original collection. I had to re-read each poem multiple times to peel back all the layers, and delighted in each new discovery. I will treasure this on my reading shelf and revisit it again. --Serena S.
The first thing that struck me about Eileen Malone's poetry was how palpable it is: here is a poet who attends to all the pleasures of the senses, giving the reader an experience of the worlds of her poems that is full of sights, sounds, and smells. The language itself is just as rich, with a subtle music woven throughout. And she is also gifted with a fine eye for sketching character (witness, for instance, the way the sense of smell powerfully reveals the yearning of the young huffer in "This One Hit, This Sniff.")
Malone is unafraid to wrestle with big concepts, like faith and grace and wonder, but she never lets her attention stray from the specific, the concrete and the embodied. It is the sensual world and the body that become precisely the instruments of mystery and faith, whether the example be a bee drinking the last bit of nectar on a peach pit ("Peach Pit") or a woman turning herself over to chemically-induced oblivion (in the startlingly empathetic opening poem "More Like Angels.") In one of my particular favourites, "Bougainvillea," she explores the divide between abstract belief and embodied faith in the conversation between a priest and the poem's elderly speaker. The priest "offers salvation/ warns if I don't believe in his god, then I must/alternatively believe in another god, or in no god [...]" and the speaker counters with: "I believe I would love a stiff gin and tonic/or two, to help me settle into a sun-warmed, gentle sleep[.]" That is just one of the many moments, in the course of reading this fine collection, where I stopped to savour the language, the disarming humour, and the mind behind them. I'm confident in saying that you will most certainly find yourself doing the same.
This is a book that not only invites rereadings; it rewards them. (Incidentally, I also had the pleasure of encountering Malone's work initially by hearing her read it and I encourage anyone who has the opportunity to hear her to go). --K. Quitt