Published by Finishing Line Press; (finishinglinepress.com) January 2025
Let’s start here: first line, first poem in Joann Deiudicibus’ chapbook: “Let the only liars you trust be poets.” This poem is a poem of declaration, but also of desire. And a wish that such desire also be fulfilled in each of us. And yet, in the very next poem, we’re presented with the unspeakable, the utmost damage humans can inflict on one another.
It’s clear the poet knows both are true, that our range of brutality sits alongside our capacity to show brilliant grace. And now, in deft positioning, the third poem in its very first line acknowledges this duality in the sparest of words: “Prepare yourself.” As the reader should prepare, in reading through this collection, for the swing between poems of grief and poems of uninhibited enlightenment as well as faith. How we’re presented with such lines as “There will be blood-black blooms, / mud-colored hair spilling like petals” (from “Survivor’s Guilt”) in contrast to “Remember the last breath should be as full as the first. // Know that every touch on your body marks a path back to love.” (“Origin Story”).
As well, these lines serve to illustrate Deiudicibus’ facility with language: imagistic, precise, evocative. Language that’s perhaps most poignant in those poems about the poet’s childhood and family. Among the poems are those that acknowledge their influences, and it seems appropriate to cite those poets as they further enhance what you can expect from reading this collection: Joy Harjo, Adrienne Rich, and the book’s epigraph which pulls lines from Mary Oliver. To return, however, to where we started (the balance/counterbalance of life that Deiudicibus presents us with) consider these two lines from “Lost & Found”, the poem from which the collection draws its title: “A daily psalm—groceries, bills, call mom— / crumpled in the pocket of laundered jeans.” Exactly so.
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Reviewed by Ken Holland, a poet and writer who frequently appears in Lightwood. See more of his work by going to our search button.
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Joann K. Deiudicibus is a poet, writing instructor and the Staff Assistant for the Composition Program at SUNY New Paltz. Her poems appear in Stone Poetry Journal, Poetry Quarterly, Typishly, Chronogram, The Shawangunk Review, Awosting Alchemy, A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley (Codhill Press), and the Calling All Poets Twentieth Anniversary Anthology (CAPS Press). Joann is the poetry co-editor of WaterWrites, (ed. Laurence Carr, Codhill Press). Her essays about poetry appear in Reflecting Pool: Poets and the Creative Process (Codhill Press) and Affective Disorder and the Writing Life (Palgrave Macmillan). She’s been reading poetry out loud in coffee houses, classrooms, and churches since her late teens. Ask her about cats, true crime, and confessionalism.
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