Description
BETWEEN EARTH AND SKY
by Jo Kennedy
$14.99, paper
978-1-64662-907-7
2022
The fifteen poems collected in Between Earth and Sky grapple with the eternal question of the human journey – what does it mean to live, to love and, finally, to let go of “the world we are adrift in.” The poems excavate memory, dream and imagination “in search of something/ familiar and alive I can touch/ listen to” and, most importantly, hold onto in a transient world.In many of these lyrical poems, images of the natural world are imbued with an otherworldliness – “…where sky/and earth and even the trees/speak a foreign tongue.” Paradoxically, it is this otherworldliness that connects the speaker to this world and to the fragile beauty and mystery of the human experience while at the same time, reminding the reader that “we cannot keep the world we love.” However bittersweet the admonition, there is also affirmation, as in the final words of the last poem “The Summer of Our Isolation.” “Lean in/lean in,” to all of life’s pain and joy, and finally, to let go of this world where “earth and sky scatter into bedrock of memory and dreams.”
Between Earth and Sky is Jo’s second poetry chapbook. Her first chapbook Wind River Song was the 1997 winner of the Anabiosis Press Chapbook Contest and received Honorable Mention in the Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Competition. Her poems have received numerous awards including First Place in the Florida Poetry Contest, Finalist in the American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Finalist in the National Writers Union competition and Second Place in the University of Illinois’ New Stone Circle competition. Her poems have been published in Hawaii Pacific Review, Streetlight Magazine, Streetlight Magazine 2017 Anthology, Lingering in the Margins: River City Poets Anthology, Kansas Quarterly, Georgia State University Review, Cream City Review, Richmond Quarterly, Oregon East, New Virginia Review, Florida Review, California Quarterly and other publications. She has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Richmond and Randolph-Macon College. She also held the position of Poet in the Schools for Richmond Public Schools and Henrico County Schools and she established the creative writing program at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond.
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