Orel Protopopescu

Thelonious Mouse
Thelonious was some cool cat—for a mouse. Scatting to the beat of his dancing feet,
the snazziest, jazziest mouse alive sends Fat Cat into overdrive!
Will sly mouse live to sing alonious?
That’s the twist in this tale of Thelonious!

What Remains
Praise from poets for What Remains:

The world Orel Protopopescu creates in her poems is rich with music, cinnamon, birds, fish,and family; with exile and celebration and mourning. "In our corner of America/where all was supposed to rise/what a pleasure to lower ourselves/and slip under a bamboo bar/further and further towards something like love..." she writes in one of my favorites from this collection. These poems revere love from the ground up, from the places it begins and the warm arms of earth in which it is laid to rest.

A Thousand Peaks, Poems from China
The poems have poetic, rhymed translations, as well as word-for-word transliterations of the characters. Beautifully illustrated, each poem is accompanied by prose texts that describe the world of these poets and the culture that inspired them.

"A wonderful sampling of Chinese traditional shi style poetry... Not only is the surface meaning captured for each poem, but also its poetic spirit and quality.”