Lost & Found by Joann Deiudicibus

The poems in Deiudicibus’ Lost & Found function as lean-tos, offering temporary shelter to stories and narratives needing to be housed, even honored. Whether meditating on her own origins or on the lives of those she feels poetic kinship with, musical artifice and the mundane quotidian combine with a hard edge to salvage a space for what might be otherwise consigned to the dustbin of histories both personal and collective.

–Timothy Liu, Timothy Liu (Liu Ti Mo) was born in 1965 in San Jose, California to immigrant parents from Mainland China. He is the author of thirteen books of poems, most recently Down Low and Lowdown: Timothy Liu’s Bedside Bottom-Feeder Blues (Barrow Street Press, 2023). He teaches in New York’s Hudson Valley, and is an intuitive reader of occult esoterica.

The poems in Lost & Found by Joann Deiudicibus sparkle with insights and innuendoes. “Salt and sand, star and seaweed, / seed and skeleton,” the images in her poems reverberate and haunt. She reveals hidden, vibrant stories. She repeats “unanswered questions,” searches for the “fingerprints of the invisible infinite.” A time of celebration, her poems leave the reader longing for a memoir. Her work transforms pain into song, forgiveness into laughter.

–Lucia Cherciu, Lucia Cherciu was born in Romania and writes in both Romanian and English. Cherciu is the author of six books of poetry, including Immigrant Prodigal Daughter (Kelsay Books, 2023) and Train Ride to Bucharest (Sheep Meadow Press, 2017). She is a professor of English at SUNY Dutchess Community College and served as the 2021–2022 Dutchess County, New York, poet laureate.