NEW! Recovery (Single)

A dear friend of mine, Susan Morales, passed away in 2018 from cancer, just days before her 70th birthday. A year and a half before, during that autumn, when her treatments seemed to be working, she sent me a poem she’d written about her hopes for recovery. The poem detailed beautifully how she visualized herself regaining health and enjoying spring in her back yard with a friend. Read more...

Receiving the Shore (Book/CD)

Receiving the Shore is a collaboration bringing together poetry by Jennifer Burd and musical settings of those pieces by Laszlo Slomovits. The ten longer poems in the book are interspersed with meditative haiku sequences and evocative drawings by artist Melanie Boyle. The accompanying CD includes song settings for all the poems, sung and accented with folk flutes by Laszlo. Musical arrangements for all the pieces are by Emmy award-winning pianist Brian Brill.

Rendered in both the written word and in music, Receiving the Shore reveals a connection to the natural world through internal and external landscapes. In one piece, water reaches

… all the way to
the truest sound inside us:

you’re here, you’re here,
you’re here.

In another, we are told to consider our perspective when we step out from a tree's shadow:

What we do
changes
what we see.

We are invited to enter these inner and outer spaces, and move through the seasons in both word and song.

Full Track List

1. Step
2. Voice
3. Summer Haiku
4. Lake Superior
5. Walking Home at Dusk
6. Autumn Haiku
7. September Song
8. Rain Is
9. Winter Haiku
10. Solstice Hymn
11. Winter Day
12. In Winter
13. Spring Haiku
14. Forget-Me-Not

Cry of Freedom (CD)

This compelling collaboration began in 2006 when award-winning poet Linda Nemec Foster first viewed the work of photographer Jacko Vassilev. His portfolio, “The Dance of Zlatio Zlatev,” appeared in Harper’s Magazine and gave visual testimony to the impoverished and marginalized people of Eastern Europe. Vassilev’s haunting portraits inspired Foster to write a sequence of poems, Ten Songs from Bulgaria, that was published by Cervena Barva Press in 2008. When Laz read Foster’s chapbook in 2011, he was immediately drawn to the poems as lyrics for songs, and began composing music for them: Cry of Freedom is the result of this partnership of art, poetry, and music.

Full Track List

1. Two Vladimirs at the Window
2. Young Shepherd in Front of Old Church
3. Creativity in Psychiatry Camp: Contrapuntal
4. Brothers, Stoian and Christo
5. Cry of Freedom
6. The Dancing Bear
7. To Protect Her Property
8. Child with Dove
9. The Dance of Zlatio Zlatev, Ex-Pilot
10. A Man is a Man When a Man is on the Road

Ten Songs from Bulgaria (Chapbook)

This is the chapbook of the ten powerful poems that are set to music in the CD, “Cry of Freedom.” (For more information, please see above.)

Into the Light

A collection of tender love poems, reverential nature poems, poems of healing and deep spirituality, all set to music and turned into songs. With soaring melodies and down-to-earth dance rhythms, here are words and music filled with encouragement, passion and caring, a touch of spicy humor, and love for our common humanity and the world we share.

Full Track List

1. Summer of Thick Toes
2. My Feet
3. You Give Me Beauty
4. No One Wrote
5. Grey Eye Blues
6. Don’t Tread Softly
7. Arlene
8. Grand Haven
9. Song of Healing
10. Congregation
11. Namaste