Rites and Wrongs of (Lib)(CD)

Joanna Pearson

Listening Library

The precise gaze and chiseled language of the poems in Oldest Mortal Myth authoritatively convey a broad and deep knowledge. Whether a re-imagining a Greek myth in order to infuse it with a contemporary pain, extending empathy and humorous Mitmenschkeit to both denizens and voyeurs of the world's freak-shows, or describing with wit and experience the spiritual affects of medical conditions, the book is infused with restrained but piercing emotion, a subtle metrical ear, and enough daring and wit to write in rhymed couplets to take the obvious, easy, way. For instance, with the last line of "De Wallen, Amsterdam": "The moon above the spires, a sexless disk,/eyes us coolly as an odalisque." I so admire the refusal to make that last line scan as a perfect iambic pentameter line. It would be so easy; all you'd have to do is add the grammatical, but colloquial, "as." Which would have ruined the line, and the poem. Oh, and the rhymes in the canzone! There's much to admire here, much to enjoy. -Marilyn Nelson Judge, 2012 Donald Justice Poetry Prize

Oldest Mortal Myth

Story Line Press

<p>The fourteen stories in Every Human Love redefine our sense of reality. Set seemingly in the quotidian, these tales veer into the unexpected, the uncomfortable, occasionally the eerie, thrusting characters in crisis into still greater quandaries, where the world of weddings and work, of frustrated hopes and mundane dissatisfactions, collides with a realm of legend, of fairy tale, of nightmare.</p>

Every Human Love: Stories

Literature & Fiction

United States

Acre Books

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Books by Joanna Pearson