QUEENS — Forest Hills author Liza Charlesworth has published more than 200 children’s books, and also written dozens, if not hundreds, of poems, but for some reason, she has never been able to publish a poetry book.
In April, her lifelong dream will finally come true as her first poetry book called "Why Happiness Makes Me Nervous" will be released by Kew Gardens-based publishing company Sullivan Street Press.
The volume will feature a selection of poems she has written over the past 20 years paired with her photographs, her more recent passion.
“I’ve always written poetry,” said Charlesworth, 52, and who studied Creative Writing & Literature at SUNY Binghamton and currently works as an editor at Scholastic.
A lot of her poems in the book "are about growing up," she said. "And they are kind of sequenced in that they start with childhood poems and they go to adult poems."
Charlesworth, who in her numerous children's books focuses on teaching kids how to read, calls herself “a confessional poet,” because her poems are mostly about her “own life," although they are often "fictionalized,” she said.
About five years ago, she also fell in love with photography because pictures are like “visual poems,” she said.
“For me they tell a story,” said Charlesworth who takes mostly pictures of urban areas and posts many of them on her Tumblr site, Beautyhog. “So that when you look at the photos it’s not just a framed postcard, it’s something that makes you feel something.”
The idea to pair Charlesworth’s poems and pictures came as a result of her conversations with Deborah Emin, the founder of Sullivan Street Press.
“Liza and I had talked for years about her publishing a book of her poems that incorporated her photographs,” Emin said. “We both knew that those two media, in her hands, spoke to each other.”
Charlesworth designed her book so that her poems "communicate" with the photos, she said.
For example, the poem that gave the book its title, "Why Happiness Makes Me Nervous" — which talks about how people, when feel happy, already somehow know that they "can’t sustain that happy state forever" — was paired with a picture of cherries.
“It’s kind of exploring the complexities of life,” said Charlesworth, who moved to Forest Hills from the Upper West Side with her husband, Justin Martin, the biographer of Frederick Law Olmsted and Walt Whitman, and their twin sons, shortly after 9/11, hoping to find "a place which felt more secure."
“Life isn’t always as perfect as a bowl of cherries,” she said.
“Why Happiness Makes Me Nervous” will be published by Sullivan Street Press this April. It will cost $18.99 (paperback) or $7.99 (e-book).
