Joan Handler's poems speak of the transmigration of a woman from an emotionally stifled girlhood through the first tentative steps of self-discovery, to, finally, the apostasy of womanhood and the ecstasy that everyday rebellion can bring. Handler undertakes daring experiments with form, shifting and thrusting words to underscore the power of the emotions in her words. Words dance on the pages of Glorious. The poetry is at once lyrical and colloquial in its language, almost narrative in its appeal.

The Reader was co-sponsored and co-conceived by CavanKerry and LaurelBooks partner, The Arnold P.Gold Foundation for Humanism in Medicine. Publisher Joan Cusack Handler and Gold Foundation President and CEO Sandra Gold observed that patients, while waiting to learn about their physical health, typically are provided only pop culture magazines--perhaps entertaining but without the solace and comfort that literature provides. The Waiting Room Reader was designed to address that need by bringing fine and accessible writing to "keep the patients company." Here are uplifting and inspiring poems...

In Orphans, a verse memoir, poet psychologist Joan Cusack Handler explores our most primitive and ambivalent relationships those with aging parents meanwhile confronting her own mortality. In a life lesson we re often unprepared for, Handler presents the reversal of roles and the eruption of unresolved conflicts that persist from childhood."