Constance Rowell Mastores was born in San Francisco and grew up in
Berkeley, CA. She has a BA in French and an MA in Comparative
Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. After
completing her MA thesis on Wallace Stevens, directed by Josephine
Miles, she left for Europe to study for a year each at the
University of Florence and the Sorbonne. On her return to the
United States, she taught in the Comparative Literature Department
at UC-Berkeley while working toward her Ph.D. Mastores is a
classicist by inclination and a modernist by choice. Mastores'
poems have appeared widely and earned numerous awards. Her poetry
has been featured in The Bellowing Ark, Blue Unicorn, and most
recently in The Magnolia Quarterly. You may also find her work in
the anthology The Phoenix Rising From The Ashes (Friesen Press,
Canada, 2013). Her book, During My Grandfather's Time (based on her
maternal grandfather), is a part of the Julius Francis Behrend
Collection, housed in The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life
at the Bancroft Library at UC-Berkeley. Constance and her husband,
Kent Nickolas Mastores, live in Oakland, California. ENDORSEMENTS I
have found these poems a constant source of pleasure. Mastores is
to me a poet of immediacy-of rapt contemplation of the phenomenal
world which, curiously, does not exclude detachment and humor-also
of an erudition that does not exclude spontaneity. She is a
dexterous wielder of both the vivid image and the musical line.
-Esther Cameron, The Deronda Review These poems of Constance Rowell
Mastores are vibrant, complex in the best sense of the word, and
superbly crafted. In most of them, her persona is an
extraordinarily intelligent and educated consciousness who seeks to
understand herself and her place and purpose in the world around
her. This restless searching, often filled with anxiety, sends her
from massive objects amid the emptiness of interstellar space to
the sub-atomic realm of quantum mechanics. She peers intently into
both her personal and our western cultural pasts, her identity
often merging with characters and events from both arenas that seem
to reflect her present state of mind. In this process she has
presented us with absorbing depictions of how memories over time
become more like dreams than reality-dreamlike because the people
and objects have been transformed into archetypal figures and
symbols. But these poems are more than intellectual exercises-they
are invested with emotional intensities that are sometimes
startling. As an added bonus, Ms. Mastores has a musician's ear for
how to create marvelous and appropriate sound effects with words
and cadences. -John Freeman, Batture Willow Press With her
shape-shifting, synesthetic imagery and her subtle use of sound,
Mastores is a poet whose words seem to breathe on the page. She is
a specialist in skies and seasons, and in the corresponding-or
commingled-seasons of the soul. Hers is a world of brightness,
shadow, and sharp focuses, sometimes dismaying, sometimes
invigorating. These windows burn, as she says in one poem, with the
clear image of winter. As editors of the poetry tri-quarterly Blue
Unicorn, we have been pleased to publish Constance's work over the
years. -Ruth G. Iodice, John Hart, Fred Ostrander Mastores' poems
reflect a wide range of experiences, from unusual encounters with
the natural world and its inhabitants, to meditations on the
cosmos, grief, and memory. Her poetic vision shines a light into
the corners of the heart. -Jean Millichamp Milliken, The Lyric
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