Edge of Highway by J. A. Lagana

J. A. Lagana’s spare and lovely poems find music and momentum in the slow lane or on the exit ramp, along a detour route, in a roadside cafe, even stalled before pre-dawn roadwork flares. Her language is by turns euphonious and honest, playful and pining, bemused and attentive, its rhythms of a piece with the goings out and comings back of the daily grind. Realizations take root, hopes find their terms, and questions get resolved, if tentatively.

In each poem the natural world speaks through metaphor as a voice within that teaches. The compactness of these poems suits to the contained nature of the car, the lane, the poet’s sure voice, disinclined as it is to waste syllables or pad lines.

Edge of Highway gives profound testimony to the fact that no stretch of hours in any given day is merely interstitial, that “there from where” and “there to where” are equally present in the journey forth—and the journey back.

–Terence Culleton, author of A Tree and Gone and A Communion of Saints

Edge of Highway pulls us into a contemplative journey, the kind that takes place alone on a daily commute. Lagana’s beautiful imagery braids the natural and built worlds, creating a liminal space where white center lines of a monotonous road become “rhinestoned,” and “dawn and sparrows lift” “like blankets strewn / across a lovers bed.” The act of reading these poems becomes the drive itself. Gently, they urge us to pay attention; they escort us as we sort out life’s entanglements in spite of the fact that “most mornings, / it’s tough to make the light.” I simply fell into these poems and did not want to exit.

–Katharine Cristiani, author of Preserving the Unraveled