Birthing Age by Joan Barasovska

The poems in Joan Barasovska’s Birthing Age tell the story of a woman from childhood to late age simply and beautifully—from the summer innocence and trust she knew as a child through a bleak emotional winter, and finally to the warmer seasons of her own “reawakened life” (“Summer’s Start”). Birthing Age is not simply about a woman’s coming to terms with the aging process, as the title might imply, but more profoundly, about bringing herself to full birth as she grows beyond expected female roles. The story of a hero’s journey into the underworld and his triumphant return is a familiar one. The story bears telling and retelling, particularly from a woman’s perspective, and in fresh voice and original idiom such as we find here. Most of us need to be reassured that we can realize the self we are capable of becoming. I admire Barasovska’s unflinching honesty; her lean poetic line, rich with monosyllables and earthy Saxon words; her extraordinarily apt and memorable images like “the shtetl of my heart” and “the village of my marriage” (“Divorce”). Brava, Joan Barasovska. These poems matter.

–Becky Gould Gibson, author of Heading Home and The Xanthippe
Fragments

In Birthing Age, Joan Barasovska writes from the hard-won perspective expressed in the last poem of the collection, “Birthing Age”: “I grow pregnant / in ripe years / ready for release.” The book examines the intimate connections between how we experience life and the wisdom we attain: “a woman walks / spinning a line of sight / jarred by her pace” (“Pine Street”). The “jarrings” of experience change what we see and know in ways we cannot control or predict. As the poet writes, “what I did right / was what I did wrong” (“What I Did Wrong”). The poet’s quest for a fully realized life is mediated by her understanding of others’ difficult lives – a shtetl dweller leaving for America, Robert Johnson at the crossroads, and a homeless woman blindly crossing a dark road in the glare of oncoming headlights. These poems teach us that achieving wisdom requires the bravery to be “all wrong / walking the world / like a flayed thing” (“Neat Trick”).
–J.S. Absher, author of Mouth Work, winner of the Lena M. Shull Book Contest

In Joan Barasovska’s splendid collection, Birthing Age, the indomitable speaker guides us through myriad rites of passage that conflate girlhood with womanhood, childhood with motherhood. She walks over a bed of coals unscathed, tempered, fire-breathing, sanctified “and [she feels] no pain / on that autumn day / when [she] burned to be / a holy woman.” Barasovska’s sacramental language lends itself to ritual. Each poem is crucial, dire, praise-song and cautionary tale – wrought from experience deeply rooted in the ken of women.

–Joseph Bathanti, author, The 13th Sunday After Pentecost, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-14)