Low-hanging Fruit by Joanne Greenway

Low-Hanging Fruit, Joanne Greenway’s third chapbook, is the work of a born storyteller. Many  of the poems are real-life tales of growing up in rural upstate New York in a family of eccentrics. An embarrassing  First Communion, Cracker Jacks, home-baked pies, a sinister doll-swiping playmate, exaggerated parental expectations—are all fondly remembered, pitied, forgiven, unforgiven, lamented. Other poems are more fanciful: Belle Starr’s horse celebrates her mistress, a cicada scorns humans who never emerge from their graves. Everything, whether realistic or fantasy, whether comic or sassy or touching or sad, is vividly descriptive, pungent in language, easily spoken and heard. Greenway has a distinct and memorable voice that conveys many kinds of stories in poems that live on the page and delight the ear for both reader and listener.

–Mark Louis Lehman, author of Long Falling Light

Joanne Greenway’s third chapbook, Low-Hanging Fruit, steers the reader down a wide and winding river making many unforgettable stops.  These poems are rich in detail, humor and wisdom.  In “Housework Epiphany,” a villanelle, she lies trapped under a ladder and, unable to get up, writes humorously of the futility of keeping pace with dirt. In a much darker vein, she writes about the lynching of Laura and L. D. Nelson, a Black mother and son:  Lynching made murder into a social event, / not unlike a square dance, picnic, or barbecue— / large crowds would gather to watch.  Describing her early widowhood, she reveals: I am invisible. This superpower/ is a dubious perk of widowhood.  In another, she lovingly portrays her father,  a second generation Italian-American, in thrall to the cowboy mystique.  There will be many places and people along this river that will stir your emotions, and there is much to learn at every stop.

–Laurel Chambers, author of Places in the Mist