Noel Sloboda - The Lost Forest of Arden

PROSE POETRY

NOEL SLOBODA

THE LOST FOREST OF ARDEN

Mom long ago lived in a verdant haven full of towering oaks, trunks and limbs skewed at wild angles, like her fingers decades later would be, never warm enough, never close enough to the Sun, none of them straight as concrete lanes today masking under tons of rock hundreds of acres slowly sinking, enshrouded roots below breaking down, like all Mom’s memories during that last, interminable year: of her favorite ice cream flavor, of the make of her first car, of the date of her
high school graduation, of the names of her three children, of where she came from, and of why she ever left.

Noel Sloboda earned his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis. His dissertation about Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein became a book. His writing on Shakespeare has appeared in a variety of journals and edited volumes. As a creative writer, Sloboda has published two poetry collections, seven chapbooks, along with hundreds of poems and stories in periodicals. He is currently a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State York, where serves as coordinator of both English and Liberal Arts.