A Passing

By Joan I Siegel

Siegel's book is a meditation, a held breath, a chord lingered on and released, the silence eloquent as the music. In these poems, memory both preserves and fails, distorts and clarifies. She meets small deaths (a hummingbird, a cat) and large (her own loved ones, and victims of war and the Holocaust) with a steady gaze. But there is also the cherry blooming outside the window, Degas' dancer, a child's new language "that sputters off your lips and drops / ripe as a juicy pear in my lap." Mary Makofske The poems in Joan I. Siegel's A Passing offer startling bardic moments. In a poem's anguished speaker, a sudden transcendence takes place. In the reader, a sudden awakening ensues from a "window's shocking brightness," or a subtle "memory of a window," or the profound emptiness of "molecules that never touch." Sandra Graff"

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0990428737
• ISBN13: 9780990428732
• Release Date: March 2015
• Publisher: Deerbrook Editions
• Length: 53 Pages