Bücher von Joan Baranow

Written during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Joan Baranow's Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague contemplates the dread uncertainty of our life. Describing hospitalized sufferers, she writes: "A patient, no longer struggling, is wheeled away. / Another sits up, accepts the bent straw between his lips." Likewise, her tough-minded yet always loving vision of domestic life invites us to inhabit a level of self-scrutiny that leaves us heartened even if also often troubled. And yet, despite the losses mourned throughout this book, the poet's humor and hopefulness prevail. In "Advice from a Moth" she exhorts us to "enjoy the erratic path." Deeply satisfying, Baranow's unaffected language is as clear and natural as a tumbler of spring water. She possesses a scrupulously honed poetic gift that is precious and rare. Arnold Rampersad, Stanford UniversityAuthor, The Life of Langston Hughes (2 vols.) Joan Baranow's Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague opens with poems about months of isolation with her spouse and college-age son during the 2020-21 pandemic. Instead of anger or boredom, her poems express tenderness with images of care and repair. They explore the natural world, paying special attention to shunned creatures: an iguana that lost its tail, insects, even a baby rat whose life she spares. In Baranow's sequence "Summer Ghazals" she asks herself about mysteries of illness, life, and death. A series of heart-thumping elegies follows soon after the ghazals. Read this wonderful book. Read all of it from "Traveling in Tiger Rain" to its final poem "Prayer," where she implores: "Let quiet hours pass without a stir / while the earth repairs." Susan TerrisAuthor of Familiar Tense"I'm there as much as here," Joan Baranow tells us, staring into a Japanese print. In richly musical and compassionate poems, Baranow reconciles our daily lives with our desirous imaginings: "most of life comes at you / while scrambling eggs in the pan." Whether writing elegies or confronting her own mortality, Baranow leans toward community for consolation and renewal, taking note of "trees sending mycorrhizal / messages underground // like teenagers vibrating / under their clothes." Literary, political, and erotic, Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague considers "What blunderous creatures we are, / holding cell phones to our heads," the poet's voice brimming with anxiety and affection. Michael WatersAuthor of CAW

"We think back through our mothers if we are women," Virginia Woolf declares in A Room of One's Own, and certainly Joan Baranow embraces a woman-centered poetics in A Slight Thing, Happiness. In this volume of poetry, Baranow explores the many phases of motherhood, beginning with her struggle with infertility treatments, toxemia of pregnancy, and the premature births of her sons. The poems that open the book narrate those early days of disappointment, hope, and gratitude with vivid images of nature as the poet negotiates her way through a harsh clinical environment. In section II Baranow looks back to women who have gone before, searching for guidance on how best to be a mother while losing her own mother to cancer. The loss of one's mother, both literally and spiritually, is a motif that recurs throughout the book. The elder women of folktale, for instance, are presented as fierce females who have tragically lost control over their lives. In "Grandma" the speaker remembers how "Once, she had carried an axe. / Once, she had flayed the little doves / so plentiful here, the specks of their eyes / bright onyx gems...." Like the grandmother in "Little Red Riding Hood," she knows that age has taken her strength and "she's the ghost now, isn't she, / blasted, blown, her legs like twisted rags." In "Sergeant Marge," a war veteran no longer able to care for herself is tied to a hospital bed, straining against the system that insists on caring for her while taking away her agency. Even the poet's own mother, speaking from the grave, has nothing but consolation to offer her grieving daughter. Although her female forebears find themselves weakened by age, their resistance to forces that restrain them is inspiring. The poet learns that casualness in the face of fear may be a model for motherhood. This third section of the book describes the world as seen by her children, a world "with or without wings," where death hovers on the margins of their awareness. Baranow mourns the ordinary deaths that occur as a natural part of life-a drowned rat, a dead fawn-yet she encourages her toddler to bravely "walk atop a stone wall, pigeon-toed." Here are poems that celebrate the heedless energy of childhood even while death remains ever-present in the poet's mind. The last section of the book moves outward as the demands of motherhood shift into a larger social sphere and the poet reconnects with friendships, marriage, and her own childhood memories. Nature remains the vital core of Baranow's relationship to life and to her image-making. She remembers when her "soul had a chance to travel / where the land was useless- / just fields of abandoned apple trees" and how she once released a cloud of termites that were immediately snatched up by dragonflies, "swooping in / like chunky bombers." Nature is physically and morally instructive, from the intimate details of reproductive life to the stars that "kept their course." Despite her admission, "I know so little about / what I love," the poet and her teenage son find themselves momentarily confiding in each other, wrapped under the night sky in the womb-like warmth of a hotel hot tub.

Joan Baranow's powerful new collection of poems, In the Next Life, reminds us that it is our passage through this life that constantly shapes the next. Our place in and passages through the natural world reflect both the questions of childhood and those few wisdoms we hope to share as adults. Always, the speaker of these poems ("closer to the end/than to birth, dreaming of death" she says) recalls a boy's question: "How does light climb the tree?" In these elegant poems of daily mortal passage, Joan Baranow is also asking, in every line, how might we, each of us, slowly climb that light? These are poems of constancy and moral courage.-David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: Selected and New Poems