Book Review: "Karen Lee Oliver's Tales from the Mirwood is a collection of poems that resemble surreal dreams, with many mysterious images (spiral staircases, labyrinths, twilight) that often come alive through personification. Oliver also includes more personal-seeming poems, pieces written in first person that peel back the illusions of the day to reveal a haunted narrator, as in "A Dark Illusion," which begins: "I live /With all the horrors/ Of the night/ To which, /My soul has an aversion." Many of the poems have medieval storylines and characters. These more intimate, vulnerable, and searching poems give readers a welcome sense of the contemporary psyche while still written with a gothic style. Those that hunger for mystical, nature-oriented fantasy will find much to enjoy." - BlueInk Review About the Author: Karen Lee Oliver was born in Poughkeepsie, New York on October the first in 1959. She furthered a potential career in ballet by moving to New York City in 1973 and there studied on scholarship at American Ballet Theatre. Ms. Oliver graduated from the State University of New York at Albany with a B.A. degree in English Literature Major/ Theater Arts Major in 1981. She has since retired from ballet and pursued her literary forte, poetry. Ms. Oliver published Pergola in 2002 with Xlibris and continues her poetic theme of love and reflection in the sequel, Tales From the Mirwood. Tales From The Mirwood was written as a sequel to Pergola, my first collection of poems. Tales From the Mirwood follows story-life fantasies that develop out of nature, history, art, fiction, religion and everyday life. Although, in Tales From the Mirwood, these dream- like images are never clearly defined, they are presented to the reader to envision as he or she chooses.