Featured Book

The volume The Speed of Our Lives contains poems about history and contemprorary life.

Noted for writing with a simple eloquence about day-to-day existence, Grace Ocasio enlightens and inspires through her poetic vision.

The Speed of Our Lives is a book of poems that draws from the lives of the famous and the not-so-famous. With this volume, I sought to bring to the surface my subjects' distinctive traits for the average reader to identify with and be inspired by. I wrote this book primarily in North Carolina. My perspective is one of a transplant, both looking back to New York while remaining moored in the present of Charlotte, North Carolina. I would classify myself as a new Charlottean, embracing the more charming aspects of the South while rejecting those elements of the South that I have found alienating. 

This book constitutes, for me, a merger of two perspectives—one of the cosmopolitan suburbanite/big city lover and the other—that of an older, more sedate observer of the natural world where animals, flowers, and trees abound. There is more pacing and grounding of life events within the pages of The Speed of Our Lives than in the chapbook, Hollerin from This Shack. So I would say my immediate environment (Charlotte, North Carolina), enabled me to slow down and ponder those events of my past coupled with those events of my present that rose to the surface of my conscious, allowing me to create a new world on paper—one in which the sounds and sights of the North settle on the page alongside the sounds and sights of the South.   

The poems in The Speed of Our Lives offset each other. Each one leads to the next although the subjects are not necessarily identical. Yet the poems speak to each other because they all possess a sense of time and place. The history of the everyman and the famous alike is at the heart of this collection.

Having lived in Charlotte for two decades now, I consider it my home away from my place of origin, New York. I am free now to reach outward to other places that will foment the seeds of poems that have yet to be created. Charlotte, with its atmosphere of lush lawns and rhododendrons, is just the place for me to sit back and indulge my imagination.