Description
Siegel's book is a meditation, a held breath, a chord lingered on and released, the silence eloquent as the music. In these poems, memory both preserves and fails, distorts and clarifies. She meets small deaths (a hummingbird, a cat) and large (her own loved ones, and victims of war and the Holocaust) with a steady gaze. But there is also the cherry blooming outside the window, Degas' dancer, a child's new language "that sputters off your lips and drops / ripe as a juicy pear in my lap."—Mary Makofske
The poems in Joan I. Siegel's A Passing offer startling bardic moments. In a poem's anguished speaker, a sudden transcendence takes place. In the reader, a sudden awakening ensues from a "window's shocking brightness," or a subtle "memory of a window," or the profound emptiness of "molecules that never touch."—Sandra Graff
Author Bio
Author of three titles from Deerbrook Editions, ARCHAEOLOGY (2017), A PASSING (2015), and HYACINTH FOR THE SOUL (2009), Joan I. Siegel is recipient of the New Letters Poetry Award, The Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, The Poetry Quarterly Rebecca Lard Award, Atlanta's International Merit Award, and a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize. Her work has been published in several journals; The Bridge, Commonweal, Cumberland River Review, Cutthroat, Raritan, and others. A recipient of the State of New York Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, Siegel lives with her husband and daughter in the lower Hudson Valley of New York State.
Author City: BLOOMING GRV, NY USA