Houston, Texas – July 25, 2022 – Press Release: Saint Julian Press is proud to announce a new book of poetry. A Slight Thing, Happiness, by author Joan Baranow, will be published on October 14, 2022.
Poems by Joan Baranow explore the many phases of motherhood, from the intimate details of infertility and premature birth to the heedlessness of childhood and the losses incurred by age. Her book is a profound affirmation of the human family.
Poems by Joan Baranow explore the many phases of motherhood, from the intimate details of infertility and premature birth to the heedlessness of childhood and the losses incurred by age. Her book is a profound affirmation of the human family.
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In A Slight Thing, Happiness, Joan Baranow bears witness to things both slight and substantial with a linguistic lens that finds the beauty in all things: “White and rosy…ovaries / globular, like scrambled egg whites”; an embryo, “beautiful / waking like that / your moons urging you / to travel the edges of the dish”; an invalid grandmother “watching nothing but light / crawl along the walls”—and from a toddler son, “his voice, a few words warbling…So beautiful, he says, pointing / at the ordinary trees.” Baranow celebrates “small things with or without wings,” seeing them as the wonders that they are, with images that prowl and haunt this collection of syntactically acrobatic, passionately crafted poems
— Terry Lucas
Poet Laureate Emeritus of Marin County, California |
In her exquisitely rendered collection, A Slight Thing, Happiness, Joan Baranow tenderly maps the journey of becoming. Becoming a mother, becoming a family, becoming someone who understands what she would do “to bear a life.” From the intricate intimacies of laparoscopic surgery to the strangely sensual seascape of a petri dish, Baranow's lush, incisive imagery reveals a scarred yet serene internal garden of organs and cells. From hospital beds to IVs and incubators, from the underdeveloped lungs of a preemie to the bruising love of early motherhood, these poems soothe and croon and bloom toward the messier, wilder garden that is the family and the world we live in. Yes, “the world flowers” in these poems, but never without acknowledgment of the work, care and tending necessary to grow and survive through all of life’s seasons, the labor of becoming. This is a vulnerable, honest, and truly beautiful book.
— Erin Rodoni
And If the Woods Carry You
And If the Woods Carry You
Supreme among the values of poetry is its ability to delight, and that delight can take as many forms as poets can find. Among the delights of Joan Baranow’s A Slight Thing, Happiness, there’s the eye that gives us startling images (“wolves, their dense aromatic fur, / the red rash of their mouths”); or the ear that makes lizards “flit / like brisk secretaries.” But there’s also delight in this poet’s engagement with the difficulties and triumphs of life and love; it is the kind of delight we all need, these days especially—the kind that brings hope.
— Robert Wrigley
A True Account of Myself as a Bird
A True Account of Myself as a Bird
Joan Baranow is the author of In the Next Life, Living Apart, and two poetry chapbooks. Her collection, Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague, won the 2021 Brick Road Poetry Book Contest. A fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and member of the Community of Writers, she founded and teaches in the Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Dominican University of CA. With her husband David Watts she produced the PBS documentary Healing Words: Poetry & Medicine. Her feature-length documentary, The Time We Have, presents an intimate portrait of a teenager facing terminal illness.
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Publication Date: October 14, 2022
Paperback: $18.00 Publisher : Saint Julian Press, Inc. (October 14, 2022) Language : English Paperback : 100 pages ISBN-13 : 978-1955194082 |
PRESS RELEASE PDF
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Saint Julian Press, Inc. * Houston, TX 77008 * Ron Starbuck ~ Publisher-CEO
Email: ronstarbuck@saintjulianpress.com * Web: www.saintjulianpress.com
Saint Julian Press, Inc. * Houston, TX 77008 * Ron Starbuck ~ Publisher-CEO
Email: ronstarbuck@saintjulianpress.com * Web: www.saintjulianpress.com
SAINT JULIAN PRESS, INC. © 2022
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As an Amazon Associate — Saint Julian Press, Inc. may earn funds from any qualifying purchases.
This arrangement does help to sustain the press and allow us to publish more books by more authors.
As an Amazon Associate — Saint Julian Press, Inc. may earn funds from any qualifying purchases.
This arrangement does help to sustain the press and allow us to publish more books by more authors.