Life on a small midwestern farm is the genesis of many of the poems in DEAD HORSES. Unsentimental and realistic, they celebrate an enduring involvement with horses (riding, breeding, foaling, and racing) and offer a tough-minded look at the vagaries of rural existence.
Life on a small midwestern farm is the genesis of many of the poems in DEAD HORSES. Unsentimental and realistic, they celebrate an enduring involvemen...
Winner of the 2013 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize. David Pichaske writes in the Foreword to this collection: "Thirty-five years is a long time in anyone's career-long enough to see how things turned out. Long enough to allow us to draw some conclusions. Long enough to trace the arc of a career...." Joan Colby: Selected Poems represents a body of work "underwritten by an intelligence itself as fiery as it is sharp" (Philip Dacey), "both loud and haunting, both vivid and quiet as a falling stone" (Christina Zawadiwsky). Includes selections from Blue Woman Dancing in the Nerve (1979), Chagall...
Winner of the 2013 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize. David Pichaske writes in the Foreword to this collection: "Thirty-five years is a long time in anyon...
The Wingback Chair, Colby's fourteenth volume of poetry, contains new poems that illustrate significant moments in her life as well as the inexorable progression of her poetry. The subjects range from the personal elements of the title poem to the historical, social, and cultural interweavings of the textile poems.
The Wingback Chair, Colby's fourteenth volume of poetry, contains new poems that illustrate significant moments in her life as well as the inexorable ...
Years drain the energy from some poets, but Joan Colby's work is as fresh and creative as ever, perhaps more so. Ribcage showcases the poet's rich imagination on subjects attempting to reconcile body and mind. The first section of the book ("The Body in Question") extends metaphors from various body parts (heart, blood, nerves, finger and hands, etc.), and the last section ("The Mind at Play") continues with a rich lyric and imagery often sung from a mystic sensibility. Humor and irony are also part of the poet's toolbox, as in "Chewed to Meat Hooks" in which the purposes of the hand are...
Years drain the energy from some poets, but Joan Colby's work is as fresh and creative as ever, perhaps more so. Ribcage showcases the poet's rich ima...
The poems in Joan Colby's chapbook BROKE were engendered by an accident in which several of the author's bones were broken. This led her to contemplate aspects of the word "broke." Due to a badly fractured wrist, the poems were laboriously printed with the non-dominant hand, which captures how the fact of brokenness, like the word itself, insinuates both damage and repair. Ironically, X rays of the tension-wire hardware used to secure Colby's shattered kneecap were eerily identical to the symbol for extinction shown on the chapbook's cover.
The poems in Joan Colby's chapbook BROKE were engendered by an accident in which several of the author's bones were broken. This led her to contemplat...
