Anna Journey - Böcker

Anna Journey's poetry is really magical."" -- David Lynch, director of Blue Velvet and creator of Twin Peaks""Anna Journey's second collection of poems is wonderful and brings something precise and wild out of a vivid night, an imagery that finds its own necessary music, like sudden isolated birdsongs at dawn. The multiplying shadows of the mind are made exterior here, surprisingly illustrated with anecdotal thought. And Dante no longer concludes that all lovers are martyrs. I'm so happy to have this work in my life."" -- Norman Dubie, author of The Volcano""Anna Journey, in her new book of poems, Vulgar Remedies, creates an alchemical self whose shimmering limbic/alembic lyrics distill the mysterious terrors of childhood, the dangerous passions of adults, into her own honey-dusk 'voodun': protective, purified to gold. Poetry is always a time machine: here we are invisible travelers to a bewitched past, a beautifully occluded future. These poems are erotic, vertiginous, revelatory, their dazzling lyric force reflecting profound hermetic life."" -- Carol Muske-Dukes, author of Twin Cities

In her third collection of poems, The Atheist Wore Goat Silk, Anna Journey once again celebrates the profusion of sensuality erupting from the material world. As she weaves dark fables, luminous family memories, and hard-edged personal tales into a singular fabric, Journey charts the boundaries of absence and departure, delineating the separations that we often hope to stitch back together at the intersections of the body and the imagination.Rhythmically charged and lyrically narrative, these poems are rich with verbal cascades and currents of mordant reflections. Throughout this collection, both readers and the poet are linked by a delicate and elegantly spun web of verse.

Anna Journey's The Judas Ear resurrects a host of vanished people and places, often through marvelous Ovidian metamorphoses that seem as natural in the gritty tableaux of Richmond, Virginia, as in the luminous transmuting vistas of folktale or myth. Journey's music is lush and visceral, her humor warm and sly, and her sensibility metes out tenderness and grotesquerie in equal parts. Like the ear-shaped mushroom named for a biblical betrayer, the poems in The Judas Ear can shift suddenly from wit to pathos, from seductiveness to danger, with a generosity of vision that is at once wise and revelatory.

Wolf Cut gathers nearly twenty years of work by Anna Journey, one of her generation's most fearlessly imaginative poets. She brings to her edgy, cinematic poems a raconteur's sly humor and anecdotal ease as well as intricately braided temporalities. From her early work's baroque lyricism tinged with the southern gothic to her capacious later poems' signature meditative allure, Journey reminds us that mystery and imagination are the luminous thresholds through which our reckonings must pass.

In this debut collection, Anna Journey invites the reader into her peculiar, noir universe nourished with sex and mortality. Her poems are haunted by demons, ghosts, and even the living who wander exotic landscapes that appear at once threatening and seductive. In these poems, her sly speaker renames a pink hibiscus on display at Lowe's, "Lucifer's Panties"; another character chants, "I'd fall devil / over heels over edge over oleander"; and one woman writes a letter to the underworld:Dear black bayou, once, by a riverI bit a man's neck. His scent: the rawteak air husked inside stomachs of sixRussian nesting dolls—the ones in the attic I pulledapart and open. The ones Ipulled apart and open like Styrofoam cups.

Entering its nineteenth year, Best New Poets has established itself as a crucial venue for rising poets and a valuable resource for poetry lovers. The only publication of its kind, this annual anthology is made up exclusively of work by writers who have not yet published a full-length book. The poems included in this eclectic sampling represent the best from the many that have been nominated by the country’s top literary magazines and writing programs, as well as some two thousand additional poems submitted through an open online competition. The work of the fifty writers represented here provides the best perspective available on the continuing vitality of poetry as it is being practiced today.