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Download Lyn Lifshin’s Radio interview on janecrown.com or listen in streaming audio.

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Hatch’s Mission

By Don Merritt
Bantam Books, 215 pages. US$7.95
A Review by Stephen Page

This is the third book of Don Merritt’s trilogy concerning the character Franklin Hatcher, nicknamed Hatch, who due to circumstance becomes a drifter-loner living on a tropical island. Hatch is a former Captain in the U.S. Army infantry.

In this closing of the trilogy, Hatch and his old college-best-friend’s wife, Jan, travel to Laos and Bangkok to seek revenge for the death of Jan’s husband. Involved in the intrigue are the CIA, mercenaries, and shoot-’em-up bad guys.

This is a book for everybody—plot readers, adventurers, gung-ho militaries, and romancers. It is great summer reader, or a weekend time-passer. The trilogy would make a great action film.

Book one: Hatch’s Island
Book two: Hatch’s Conspiracy
Book Three: Hatch’s Mission is available on-line at Amazon, Abebooks, and Open Library.

Don Merritt is a United States Expat who lives in Argentina and now writes under the name of Donigan Merritt. His blog is here: http://doniganmerritt.wordpress.com/  His Author webpage is here: http://doniganmerritt.com/

His recent novels, The Common Bond, Possessed by Shadows, and Blossom are available at KEL Editions in Buenos Aires, and on Amazon.

Stephen Page has three poems published in Two Hawks Quarterly

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Ranch Poems

Stephen Page

Last Night I Dreamed Rain

 

 

The clouds quickened under a wax

moon, then settled around plastic palm

fronds. My truck stuck in river bed

three, and just like the time it slipped

into a ditch, I tried to push it out

alone, putting it in gear, then straining

under the bumper, only this time the Tale

Teller arrived on tractor without my call.

Voiceless, I accepted his pull, the Fence

Builders heying from a distance. The damp Cat

rubbed my bare legs while I smoked

a filterless cigarette and the Blonde Collie Bitch chased white ponies around the yard. A blue-eyed

blonde woman, her hair plastered

to her face, her freckles sheening, a scotch

on the rocks in her hand, offered me a blow

job while I barbequed blood

sausage and tenderloin. A pebble-sized

coal, meant to sizzle the meat, rolled

off the brick platform and plopped

into the sand, burrowed under my shoe and came

to rest against the dry grass edging the lawn.

I poured out half a cold beer to extinguish the flames,

and then it began to rain.

 

The Horseback Vet

 

My white pickup was splashing mud

when I lept out

near the wood in lot twenty-one.

 

A cow was lying on her side,

her eyes rolled back,

throat gurgling air.

 

A calf was stuck halfway out

of the uterus, bloody faced, tongue lolled,

crimson bubbles popping from its nostrils.

 

I grabbed it by the forelegs

and tugged it out, cleared its nose

and throat with my fingers.

 

I pressed on the cow’s chest

every five seconds, then stroked

them both and whispered reassurances;

 

but I feared I had arrived too late

to prevent them from lifting

into eucalypti leaves.

 

Then He rode up behind me,

jumped from his horse,

syringes strapped to his belt.

 

He rubbed placenta on her nose

grabbed her by the tail and spun her around

so she could fully scent her calf.

 

We watched her wobble to her feet,

the calf rolled over onto his stomach

and pricked up his ears.

 

On Ranching

 

All this ass kicking and horse riding

and calf pulling and gate lifting and truck

pushing has herniated my abdomen.

The fleeting rain does not puddle as

it did last month. Constants are

falling fenceline and the need

for grass. I have been here before.

I have been here before. The new

gaucho enters my office for the first

time, and I have seen his face

somewhere. Here. His black sombrero,

bombachas, and silver spurs; his white beach

hat, blue jeans, and tennis shoes. Again, again.

The mail lady’s red hair keeps me supplied

with stamps. Me Tarzan, you Jane.

A rice shoot leans against my desk

lamp, and outside, wheat is shin

high. Cut the thistle, cut the thistle.

The security chain we had for months

on gate twenty-eight seems

can be slipped right over the post.

Have you ever had brain cells zapped

by an electric fence? The Cultivators

are fumigating again. A beetle falls

upon my notebook. I must keep

the calves from vaginal death,

and the cows exploding from bloat.

---

Stephen Page is the author of The Timbre of Sand and Still Dandelions. He holds a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from Bennington College. He is the recipient of The Jess Cloud Memorial Prize for Poetry. He loves to spend time with his family, teach, ranch, and stroll through the woods.

Tags: Last Night I Dreamed Rain, On Ranching, Poetry, Ranch Poems, ranching, Stephen Page, The Horseback Vet

This entry was posted on October 20, 2011 at 1:37 am and is filed under Current Issue, Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Copyright © 2011 Two Hawks Quarterly. All Rights Reserved.

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You Feel Left Out in the Rain

Left Out in the Rain
By Gary Snyder
Shoemaker Hoard Publishers
209 pages
reviewed by Stephen Page

Reading Snyder is like taking a stroll through the woods on a pleasant early summer morning, the scent of fecund earth filling your nostrils, fresh air your lungs, birdsong your ears. Sunlight flickers through the tree canopy and you blink, suddenly realizing that the woods no longer exists, that you are standing on a hillside of tree stumps, smell only sawdust and carbon monoxide, hear only the traffic on the highway behind you. You know what will follow, because the same thing has happened before in almost every country in the world, the tree stumps will be removed, the hill will be farmed or constructed with a house, and the next big rainfall will wash away the topsoil leaving only rock and shale. Reading Snyder you feel you have travelled around the globe with him, climbed mountains, been indoctrinated into Dharma, witnessed the human race repeat the same mistakes over and over again since the beginnings of recorded history—those same crimes against nature which affect standards of global life and community. Snyder’s poems are immediate and vivid. You feel plunged into his world. You feel sung to by the body earth, you feel sung to by the body universe, you feel sung to by the bodies of his lovers. Left Out in the Rain is a book packed full of high-quality poems, however, there are a few poems in the collection that could have been left to weather a bit longer before they were published.
Snyder starts the collection wonderfully. In “Elk Trails,” he comes down from the mountains, sage-like, full of knowledge and learning, enlightened by the Gods:

I have walked you, ancient trails,
Along the narrow rocking ridges
High above the mountains that
Make up your world:
Looking down on giant trees, silent
In the purple shadow of ravines
Along the spire-like alpine fir
Above the high, steep slanting meadows
Where sun-softened snowfields share the earth
With flowers….

Dainty Alpine flowers.
And from the ridgetops I have followed you
Down through the heather fields, through timber,
Downward winding to the hoof-churned shore of
One tiny blue-green mountain lake
Untouched by the lips of men………

In the snow, or napping in the mountain grasses
On warm summer afternoons, high in the meadows.
And their God laughs low and often
At the man-made trails….

Ancient wandering trials
Cut and edged by centuries of cloven hooves
….Routes and destination seemed aimless, but
Charted by the sharp-tempered guardian of creatures,
Instinct….

(High above, the Elk walk in the evening
From one pasture to another
Scrambling on the rock and snow
While their ancient wandering,
Aimless trails.
And their ancient, coarse-haired,
Thin-flanked God
Laughs in silent wind-like chuckles
At man, and all his trails.

The meter here is natural, rhythmic. It works as an imitation of walking, stepping, in relation to the actions of the narrator and the Elk. The lines move effortlessly from trochaic to iambic, occasionally anapestic, as one would occasionally miss a step when walking upon a snow ridge, but it is never forced, never unnatural. The sibilance of the consonant s adds a slipping and sliding effect to the step. Thematically, the character has come down from the mountains realizing that man is not in tune with nature. Man needs to make his path like the Elk do, instinctively.

Cleverly, the second poem follows:

Out of the soil and rock,
The growing sea and spring, death
and winter,
Out of cold the cold and rain, dust and sunshine,
Came the music of cities and street,
The people……

Creatures of salt, carbon, nitrogen, water….

The city smoke and building steel
Already is no more;
The music and cities of the future wait beyond the edge.

Man and nature spring from the same place, not only that, we are made up of the same materials. However, man cannot continue the way he lives. He must change to remain in sync with the world. Snyder ends on a positive point, that the method of change is just a while into the future. The first line, indented, is intelligently constructed like a fountain exuding materials. The varied line length reflects the swinging back and forth from nature to cities to nature.

Similar to the first poem, the love poem “She dreamed . . .” works metrically like stepping, in the manner of a cougar, pacing, bounding, turning, running. Again well done. The poem also stipulates, metaphorically, a need for man to get back to his natural ways.

In “The Persimmons,” Snyder reveals something many environmentally concerned people are not aware of:

…where the Great Wall wanders
the oaks had been cut for lumber or charcoal
by Genghis Khan’s time.

Man has been destructively exploiting the earth for a long time, and this behavior has not been limited to Western culture, consumerism, and capitalism as many people now believe. The poem is structured in free verse, short-lined, densely packed like a layering of thousands of human generations.

“Know,” is a poem that expands on the topic of man and nature:
The trees know
Stars to be sources

Like the sun,
Of their life;

But many and tiny
Sprinkled through the dark

When,
Where has the sun gone—–

We all come from stardust. The sun is just one of many stars. We are just a speck in the huge universe. Snyder cleverly constructs the poem in short flowing lines so that it imitates the sprinkling down of stardust.

Unfortunately, we need talk a bit about the not-so-good poems. “Song for a Cougar Hide,” is a rhyming poem set up mostly in iambic tetrameter. It is not consistent though, and some of the lines fall into trimeter:

The fully human time is nigh,
Alas, the other beasts must die…

I have logged and I have planted
Killed and birthed in measure
Forgot what I learned to learn
A cougar hide’s my treasure.

The meter is forced in order to get to an overly obvious end rhyme. By using archaic words like ‘nigh’ and ‘alas,’ Snyder is either lost or being ironic. In either event it does not work within the collection.

And then there is the poem “Poetry Is the Eagle of Experience,” with the line ‘A whistle of Wings!’ Isn’t that a little bit of a cliché? Also, there are the poems on pages 181 and 192 where the meter is also forced and the rhyme predictable. Snyder, Snyder, Snyder—read bishop, Auden, and Shakespeare if you want to learn how to make rhyme and meter natural. Finally there is the anti-haiku ‘Spring’ that becomes a gem out of Snyder’s sarcasm. An accidentally well-done haiku.

Snyder is better off sticking to free verse. There his poems flow and form to the subject matter. His muse works better that way. He went to the trouble of adding an introduction to this republication. He states that many of the poems were just exercises and playing around with forms. If this is true, why put them in a collection with so many good poems? Why not include them in another book, one about how and how not to write poems? He seems to be slitting his own throat. The poems themselves hand him the knife, as in the anti-haiku that becomes a great haiku. Writing forced meter and predictable rhyme as an anti-traditional statement does not reveal that traditional verse is bad poetry, it only reveals that Snyder was not successful at writing traditional verse. He also states in the introduction that the title ‘is not to be taken as meaning discarded or deserving neglect.’ It appears weak having to explain this. Is it because he received so much flak from readers and critics as to the quality of some of the poems? He might have saved himself by having someone else write the introduction. Better yet, to have better edited the weaker poems, or to have never published them in the first place. He does manage a bit of deliverance by ending the collection with a prose poem, perhaps an admittance of what he should be writing.

This review first published on Gently Read Literature

Esther Cross and Ricardo Coler – My Favorite Text – Lamujerdemivida en FILBA – with Esther CrossEstán invitados: Domingo 11 19 hs en FILBA

Para agrandar, clickeá en la imagen.

La revista Lamujerdemivida coordinará esta lectura en la que escritores y periodistas leerán un breve fragmento de su obra favorita en un minuto. Una multiplicidad de voces para rastrear influencias.

Participan: Aníbal Jarkowsky, Guillermo Martínez, Gerardo Rozín, Sergio Olguín, Ricardo Coler, Eugenia Zicavo, Hinde Pomeraniec, Christian Kupchik, Daniela Kozak, Esther Cross, Javier Sinay, Leni González, Nicolás Hochman,Cynthia Rimsky (Chile), Andrea Jeftanovich (Chile) y Santiago Nazarian (Brasil).

Domingo 11. 19 hs. en Eterna Cadencia. Honduras 5582. Después, brindis.

Quedan invitados!

Mi Familia es un Dibujo (My Family is a Cartoon) reruns are back on Channel Telefe

Mi Familia es un Dibujo (My Family is a Cartoon) reruns are back on Channel Telefe (channel 11 on Cablevisión, and channel 123 on DirecTV).  The show is fun to watch.  It as a situation comedy with a little drama thrown in.  The basic plot-line is such:

An Argentine middle-class married couple has four children they are raising.  Two of the kids are teenagers that are going through the trials of adolescence—young love, rock-n-roll, fitting in with their peers, discovering the meaning of “responsibility.” A third child is an 8-rear-old girl who is the “good” child, often acting as the bonder of the family.  The fourth child is, if you are open to the fantastical, a cartoon—the result of his mother watching too much television while she was pregnant (is there a moral in that?). The cartoon-boy, named Dibujo (cartoon) is the  “different” one—the good yet rebel-rouser—maybe you could classify him as the “special” one in the family (you know who that is in your extended family), the black sheep, or if you pushed the symbolism a bit, you could even find him as the “ugly duckling.”  Grandpa also lives with the family, a widower set on making meaning with his life by contributing to the daily lives of the rest of the family.

Stella Maris Closas and Germán Kraus

Stella Maris Closas plays the mother.  This is a great show for Expats to watch in order to practice their Castellano (Argentine Spanish), as the actors are all articulate and the sound track is good quality.  It is also a great show for Stella Closas fans, who are, as they say for the Boca Juniors fans, half the population of Argentina plus one.

Marcela Kloosterboer

Germán Kraus plays the father, and Marcela Kloosterboer plays the adolescent girl—an added bonus for movie and TV fans, as Kloosterboer became a successful adult actress and has often been called one of the most beautiful Argentine women, ever, ever.

Seven Floors Up

By Cati Porter
Mayapple Press. 59 Pages. $14.95
Reviewed by Stephen Page

Cati Porter’s Seven Floors Up is about wifehood, womanhood, and most expressively, adulthood. Porter reveals in varied forms of verse the roles of a contemporary married mother.

The narrator of the poems has a husband, two children, a cancer-ridden dog, a mother, a stepmother, a mother in law, and a couple of people in her extended family who are terminally ill. She often reflects on how she got to where she is, and in her everyday occurrences she inadvertantly divulges to the reader that being an adult means accepting responsibility and not showing that you are falling apart inside. Protecting her children from every day scrapes and falls is big on her list of things to do. To keep her life from getting heavy, she often looks for and finds the humurous things in life.

This is a well-written book containing a good combination of serious and funny poems. It is an interesting read for anyone.

This book may be purchased here:http://www.mayapplepress.com/BookPages/Porter.htm

http://cgi.ebay.com/Seven-Floors-Up-Cati-Porter-Paperback-2008-/341480558681

The publisher is Mayapple Press

Read about the author Cati Porter

What Work Is

By Philip Levine
77 pages. Alfred A Knopf Books, $15.00.
Reviewed by Stephen Page

Philip Levine is the voice of the working class, the undereducated, the unambitious. He speaks for those who do not know how to speak for themselves or were never taught how to stand up for themselves. He gives voice to those who never thought to ask, “Is this what work is really all about?” He creates portraitures of laborers and brings them to life, allowing them to communicate to the reader, even if it is only through their actions. Levine, a master artist, after giving the subjects sound and movement, mutes them again, paints them back into their frames.

We are drawn into the first poem, a rendering of man wearing rubber protective gear and a respirator descending the steps into a pickling tank to work with a cocktail of hydrochloric acid and other caustic chemicals. The man knows of the dangers of his job, but continues to go down into the tank twice a day. At lunch he sits apart from the other workers in silence. He is proud that the other workers know him only by his nickname, and proud that his dangerous job gives him reputation and meaning in life.

The second poem, “Coming Close,” mootably the best of the collection, begins with the narrator pausing for a moment to scrutinize a fellow worker to whom he delivers parts:

Take this quiet woman, she has been
standing before a polishing wheel
for over three hours, and she lacks
over twenty minutes before she can take
a lunch break. Is this a woman?
Consider the arms as they press
the long brass tube against the buffer,
they are striated along the triceps,
the three heads of which clearly show.
Consider the fine dusting of dark down
above the upper lip, and the beads
of sweat that run from under the red
kerchief across the brow….
then lifting with a gasp, the first word
of tenderness between the two of you,
then you must bring new trays of dull,
unpolished tubes. You must feed her,
as they say in the language of the place.
Make no mistake, the place has a language,
and if by some luck the power were cut,
the wheel slowed to a stop…she would turn
to you and say, “Why?” Not the old why
of why must I spend five nights a week?”
Just “Why” even if by some magic
you knew, you wouldn’t dare speak
for fear of her laughter, which now
you have anyway as she places the five
tapering fingers of her filthy hand
on the arm of your white shirt to mark
you for your own, now and forever.

The narrator is aghast at the appearance of the worker, thinks it a mutation, an unnatural being. It is only at the end of the poem that he admits she is a woman, with the image of the feminine fingers. There is no direct conversation between them, only their mutual knowledge of work slang, a gasp, her laughter, and a final physical touch. She doesn’t question her existence, would only question why the wheel stopped, if it did, as if her work were her only means of identity. The narrator does not tell but allows you to figure out that it is possibly the work that has changed her physical appearance.

In “Growth,” we have another statement on the dumb self-image:

In the soap factory where I worked
when I was fourteen, I spoke to
no one and only on man spoke
to me…..
where I hammered and sawed, singing
my new life of working and earning,
outside in the fresh air of Detroit
in 1942, a year of growth.

The boy, bursting into adolescence and the age of individuality, celebrates his place in the world by being proud he is earning money, not a bad thing considering it is a time of high unemployment, but he is not even considering the dangers of working in a soap factory. There is only a snide remark on the polluted air of Detroit. He feels no need to talk to anyone. He identifies himself through his newly found job as if it were a badge pinned on him saying, hey, this is who I am.

“Among Children” is a portrayal of a schoolteacher in a fourth grade classroom. His students are the children of the factory workers that live in and around Flint. They are at naptime, a metaphor for how they are inevitably going to sleep their way through life, “so as to be ready for what is ahead,” slaving silently at dangerous jobs until they meet death. The children at ten years old are already being trained as physical laborers, evident by:

…how there backs have thickened,
how their small hands, soiled by pig iron,
leap and stutter even in dreams.

The teacher has no words of encouragement for them, no hope that they will be anything else in life other than what they are, what they were born into. He even reflects back to their births, stating, “not one said, I am sick, I am tired, I want to go home,” revealing personalities that will be perfect for silent acceptance into the working life.

In another teacher-student poem, “M. Degas Teaches Art & Science at Durfee Intermediate School,” the teacher makes a diagonal line across the blackboard and asks, “What have I done?” Several children offer logical answers, “You’ve broken a piece of chalk,” “you have created the hypotenuse of an isosceles triangle,” “you have begun to represent the roof of a barn,” “You’ve begun to separate the dark from the dark,” but M. Degas is waiting for only one answer—hers. This is a statement on conformity, the taking away of free thought that is prevalent in working-class public schools, and perhaps for a reason. How else will these students grow up and tolerate their grinding lives if they are not taught to accept authority. An orange is blue, if that is what the boss tells you. And, you, the worker, will agree, may even come to believe it.

The collection ends with “The Seventh Summer,” a poem about the narrator’s problems with his Jewishness. He receives all kinds of flak for his religious identity, and for several hours one fine summer Sunday, he doubts his teachings and his God. He spends the afternoon enjoying the beauty of the world and life, thinking that it could possibly be the suffering of the Son of God who made salvation possible. In the end, he rescinds into himself and his belief, though he never tells anyone, never stands up for himself. He slips out of the poem in silence, holding his head down with his Christian friends during grace, abstaining from saying the words, most definitely not thankful for what is being fed to him, and not accepting the norm.

Levine is from Detroit, where most of these poems take place. Unlike most of the people portrayed in What Work Is, Levine went to college and received a degree. He, unlike his portraitures, chose to do physical labor because he wanted a non-thinking job in order to free his mind to write. Levine offers no hope for the majority of the working class, offers no solution for the masses. He offers no demonstrations, no sit-down strikes, no cry against working conditions, no ripple in the fabric of society. There is only hope for the individual, not for the group. Does that diminish from the collection? On the contrary, it is non-didactic. By exposing these conditions Levine allows the readers to draw their own conclusions, to learn from the mistakes of others. Yes, Levine deserves the recognition he received for this book. He is a master poet—a maestro of maestros.

This review first published in the Buenos Aires Herald, 20 February 2011.

Oliver as Nature

American Primitive by Mary Oliver

Reviewed by Stephen Page

This afternoon, I am rereading Mary Oliver’s American Primitive for the sixth time. I first opened the book yesterday, and every time I reopen it, the poems make me forget the reason I am reading the book. I am supposed to be looking for an interesting topic to write an essay about. Each time I get a thread of an idea on what to write, the poems carry me to the place the narrator is, climbing a tree, eating blackberries, standing by a pond, watching a bobcat walk by, feeling large snowflakes land on my upturned face and melt on my cheeks. I am immersed in the poems. Being of quick mind, it took me only six readings of the book to understand why. This is Oliver’s intent. She immerses the reader into the poems by immersing herself into the narrator who immerses herself into the subject she is observing.

The poem ‘White Night’ is a prime example of what I am speaking about:

All night
I float
in the shallow ponds
while the moon wanders

burning,
bone white,
among the milky stems.
Once

I saw her hand reach. . .

the muskrat
will glide with another
into their castle
of weeds . . .

I want to flow out
across the mother

of all waters,
I want to lose myself . . .

You see how the narrator and the muskrat are similar in place, viewpoint, and action? They are congruous. Similarly, the second party, “her”, corresponds to the fourth party, “another.” This “her” is possibly a lover of Oliver’s, and “another” is a mate of the muskrat, but if you take into consideration that Oliver starts the poem with “I,” and not “We,” I am guessing “her” is the transition-being of the narrator to the muskrat. A morph. At the end of the poem the speaker is the muskrat.

Similar transformations happen throughout the collection, in fact, almost in every poem—though Oliver is talented enough to make each transition unique. Sometimes she writes mirror poems; for example, the bear poems. In one she is observing a bear climbing a tree, finding a honeybee nest, enjoying the taste of the honey and so elated by the sweetness he is ready to fly like a bee. In a sequential poem, the narrator is the bear, climbing the tree, having paws, eating bees that are in the way of her raid of the golden syrup, and then she too has the fantasy to fly.
Of course, success at having the reader become the subject via the narrator via the writer is due solely to the talent of Mary Oliver. Her lush language immerses the reader into the subject by stimulating all of the senses. Only an adroit writer can pull this off. Most writers resort to didacticism and over-explanation—Oliver simply shows, she never tells.

American Primitive has myriad themes that could be discussed in depth, but my theory is that Oliver was trying to convey one main idea—that is, that every living thing on this earth is connected. She shows this in several ways: one, the morphing; two, by having subjects who die, or pass on, return to the earth or to the sea; three, the title, which along with several poems in the collection infers that the people who were living on the continent of America before Europeans arrived some five hundred years ago were in tune with the natural world—this is an indirect way of saying that the people who populated America the last half a century are not so in tune.

this book review first published in the Buenos Aires Herald, November 28, 2010.

PLAIN ENGLISH FOR SPANISH SPEAKING PROFESSIONALS

English today is the language of choice for all business communication. To remain competitive, Spanish-speaking professionals must be able to communicate effectively in English. But how? In the English-speaking world today there is an increasing tendency to move away from complicated writing for business documents. This tendency is called Plain English. Learn to communicate better in English with our courses.

WHAT IS PLAIN ENGLISH?

Plain English is clear, concise and direct. Using the active voice, short sentences and avoiding unnecessary words, it is writing that focuses on the reader.

THE PLAIN ENGLISH MOVEMENT

Plain English started in English-speaking countries in the 1970s to help consumers understand complex legal and official documents. Now often known as Plain Language, it has grown into a global movement and in some countries like Sweden has even reached legal status.

LANDMARKS

In 1998 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission published A Plain English Handbook: how to create SEC disclosure documents. This was a landmark in the financial and legal worlds as it set out clear guidelines on how to write official documents.

WHO IS PLAIN ENGLISH FOR?

Plain English is particularly useful for lawyers as it avoids ambiguity and promotes clarity. Many lawyers find that avoiding legalese and lengthy, complicated wording enables them to reach their clients more easily. Plain English is also useful for any professional working in English, particularly those in the Communications field.

PLAIN ENGLISH FOR THE SPANISH-SPEAKING PROFESSIONAL

Joanna Richardson brings specially adapted Plain English courses to the Spanish-speaking professional working in the English language. Short, practical and based entirely on real life examples from the workplace, her courses give Spanish-speakers the tools to communicate more effectively in the English-speaking world.

Check out the website here: http://www.plainenglish.com.ar/