Poetry. "These passionate, caring poems range seamlessly from personal lyric to public outcry, from a pair of well-turned pantoums of childhood memories to a poem that rewrites the liturgy of a responsive reading from the Passover service. Siegel knows how to go for the small specific details that illuminate even the darkest subjects"--Maxine Kumin. "HYACINTH FOR THE SOUL is a beautifully well-worked piece of imagination: ironic, lyrical, and elegant. Siegel's poems so often begin in daily living, poems that value the very simple or modest: what 'abides' or 'suffices.' Sometimes somber, and sometimes happy, her poems shoot out into the cosmos and let us look at our living from that vantage. There are the pleasures of metaphor, where the parts of an idea suddenly condense or burst into a completely new structure that we recognize immediately: the 'shape turning in the flame'"--Rosemary Deen.

Author Hometown: BLOOMING GRV, NY USA



About the author: Joan I. Siegel is recipient of the 1999 New Letters Poetry Prize and the 1998 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award. Professor Emeritus of English at SUNY/Orange, she lives in New York's Hudson River Valley.