Moods, Minds, and Multitudes
Book I – Somewhere Between There and Here
Poems and Photographs by Linda Joy Burke
A review by Kirk Mullen, facilitator of BES’s Poetry Sunday 

Our Sunday School teacher, Linda Joy Burke, has produced a chapbook composed of seven poems and eight accompanying photographs. In reading the poems, I had to stop after the first two – to psychologically catch my breath. It was as though a vein had been opened up and my life was slowly ebbing away. The only remedy was to put the poems down and come back to them later in the day.


After finishing the poems later that day, I told a friend about how good they were. The poems are disturbing, because they easily take root within your affective domain and those roots are nourished by the images and thoughts that you, the reader, have had to suppress in order to get your mundane and necessary activities of life accomplished. Ms. Burke’s photographs complement her poems. The two, (photographs and poems) chronicle that which is happening around us at this very moment, and yet half of the poems were written between two and five years ago.


If you desire to read well-written socially conscious poems that make you think and reflect on our times, then I suggest that you contact Ms. Burke. Good poetry does not always bring a smile to your face.


Copies of Moods, Minds, and Multitudes are available for $15.