In the Next Life
by Joan Baranow
Published by Poetic Matrix Press
87 pages, $17.00
ISBN: 978-1-7337025-0-8
The Book
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
Author Biography
Joan Baranow is the author of Living Apart and two poetry chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, Spillway, and elsewhere. A VCCA fellow and member of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, she founded and directs 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 young woman facing terminal illness.
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