After by Judith Prest

 

 

This book of poems gives voice to the experience of rape – the unspeakable brutality women experience at the hands of men.  I want to be unwaveringly attentive to Judith’s fierce and bold clarity. But this is hard because these raw poems make me flinch.  And they should.  As a poetry therapist, I urge people to “leave the roots on / and the dirt.”  These poems show us roots & dirt.  Judith writes “This time I carry creation’s fire / over the bridge.”  Judith’s poems, at their depth, carry a life-affirming, creative fire.  After provides a bridge to a hard-won healing journey.

–John Fox, poet, director of Institute for Poetic Medicine, and author of Poetic Medicine, and Finding What You Didn’t Lose.

 

Judith’s poems run like water, like wine, like blood through the veins of these times. They are verbs—inviting, involving, reverberating. They speak of the ugly in a language of beauty; narrate the terrors in a tone of triumph. There is not a woman who will not see herself here. Not a man who will not, if his heart is open, come closer to the light.

 

These poems illumine, enrage, examine. If you wonder can it happen that your pain turns to wisdom, read these lines, feel these words—they are pathways back to the center of yourself.

–Jan Phillips, author of There Are Burning Bushes Everywhere

 

Judith has turned her face to the light in her moving and important woman-poems. She has also delved deeply into her dark side and come out singing in her one of a kind heartfelt poems.

–June Gould, Ph.D. Author of E.P. Dutton’s The writer in All of Us and workshop leader at the International Women’s Writing Guild summer and Big Apple conferences.

 

In After, Judith Prest  names “the scar that alters everything” and reveals there is “no moving forward without a journey to revisit the disaster scene,” Come, accompany this brave woman on a journey through rough terrain to reclaim “her worth.” Truth and music dance in her words.  Revisit, through the eyes of a poet, wife, therapist, and mother, the life-dividing (or altering?) experience of rape and then redemption. Judith asks the reader to “remember you are made of light” and find “pockets of light in the dark.”  Judith Prest‘s voice and stories will move you and leave you altered.

–Linda Leedy Schneider, author of Some Days: Poetry of a Psychotherapist, founder of The Manhattan Writing Workshop and workshop leader for The International Women’s Writing Guild.