News from the North by Catherine Jagoe

In these intense, musical poems of life lived in the cold of Wisconsin, the heat of cycling through the countryside, poet Catherine Jagoe gives us fire and ice, the great immigrant crossings of ocean and continent, seasons and decades, the journey from one heart to another, “a door long shut/ inching open” to find the news of “our unremarkable existences/ with their secret, iridescent insides.”

–ROBIN CHAPMAN, AUTHOR OF DAPPLED THINGS AND ONE HUNDRED WHITE PELICANS

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

As I read News from the North, like Jagoe, I “never expected happiness,” but found it in her moving words. These poems give us North, both the ever-changing physical landscape and the metaphorical North of our innerscapes as well. There is here a deep sense of discovery.

–SUSAN ELBE, AUTHOR OF THE MAP OF WHAT HAPPENED, WINNER OF THE 2012 BACKWATERS PRESS PRIZE

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

In this tender and ferocious collection, English immigrant Catherine Jagoe explores her adopted home in the Upper Midwest – and the other Norths it summons – with a gaze both “exquisite and pitiless,” writing about the physical and natural world with such dazzling detail and emotional resonance that we see it forever differently. In language as exacting as Bishop’s and imagery as rich as Roethke’s, these beautiful poems limn a life that, while sometimes difficult, is also “drunk with possibilities,” glowing, lit by the wonder of “every little sun.”

–ALISON TOWNSEND, AUTHOR OF PERSEPHONE IN AMERICA AND THE BLUE DRESS: POEMS AND PROSE POEMS

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]