Garden of Eve by Joanne Grumet
$14.99
Joanne Grumet’s poems take place in a flash, in the moment between appearance and vanishing. A lizard’s “chest pulses/his needle-fine nails hold on.// He moves when I turn away/ and then you are gone// and then you are gone.” They celebrate the gorgeous ephemerality of the world; she knows how to have an epiphany, as in the sudden consciousness of illness and decline in her hiking villanelle, “Alzheimer’s”— “I lost my footing in some tangled vines…in the forest of grief I missed the signs,” or in the acceptance of the damaged vase made by a friend, chipped by the poet, “but whose integrity remains intact.”
–Hilary Sideris, author of Un Amore Veloce and The Silent B
Garden of Eve by Joanne Grumet fuses spare, exacting observations of the natural world with startling glimpses of emotional rawness. In “Tulips,” flowers “tight as dancers’ thighs” open with the grand gestures of a performance, invoking the speaker’s bittersweet closure: “Let me die, too, after such a show.” Garden of Eve is a show you won’t want to miss. It’s a surface held to light and turned in small, precise degrees, and that makes all the difference.
–Lynn McGee, author of Tracks and Sober Cooking.
I admire Joanne Grumet‘s poetry for its clarity, how she uses her sharpness of vision to see into her feelings and the feelings of the world around her. Her sensitivity to the natural world is deep. And there are marvelous surprises in these poems, as when she “turns a phrase inside out / like a pulled off sweater.” I’m also happy to have this book for the life wisdom in it, a wisdom that warms and brightens every page.
–Bill Zavatsky
Description
Garden of Eve
by Joanne Grumet
$14.99, paper
978-1-64662-289-4
2020
Joanne Grumet was born in New York City and got her degrees in Linguistics from Queens College, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and New York University. She was a Lexicographer and worked on dictionaries for Funk and Wagnall’s and Random House. She has taught Linguistics and currently teaches Writing for Non-native Speakers at the City University of New York. Her poems have been published in The Poetry Quarterly, The Same, and Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, as well as online at BigCityLit.com. In addition, her poetry is in the archives of the Brooklyn Museum. Joanne also writes songs, and she and her music and poetry have been featured on the cable tv show The Song, out of Deerfield, Massachusetts. Her songs can be heard at www.reverbnation.com/summerwind
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