Judas Ear: Poems

Description: "The poems in Anna Journey's new collection, The Judas Ear, resurrect a host of vanished people and places, often through marvelous Ovidian metamorphoses that are as natural in the gritty tableaux of Richmond, Virginia, as in the luminous shape-shifting vistas of folktale or myth. A restaurant server donates her eggs to a fertility agency for rent money and morphs into the golden goose, a pair of art-school roommates communicate through a private language based on Renaissance artist Arcimboldo's invertible paintings that change from portrait to still life, and a vintage pink couch sourced from a meningitis clinic transforms from an object of domestic comfort to a viral threat. Journey's music is lush and visceral, her humor warm and sly, and her sensibility metes out tenderness and grotesquerie in equal parts. Taking its title from the ear-shaped mushroom named for a biblical betrayer, The Judas Ear offers poems that can shift suddenly from wit to pathos, from seductiveness to danger, with a generosity of vision that is at once wise and revelatory"--

Brief description: Anna Journey is the author of the poetry collections The Judas Ear, The Atheist Wore Goat Silk, Vulgar Remedies, and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. She is associate professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Review Quotes:

"Between first and second readings of The Judas Ear, I could not shake Baba Yaga's scent; a bearded, naked potter; and the biodegradable funeral suit of Luke Perry. Even now, Anna Journey's lines echo like lines of a song. The final word is 'blooming.' The poems are big, rangy, expansive in Whitmanesque, democratic ways. They have a narrative charisma but maintain Dickinson's perversity, independence. Journey is as much a storyteller as a poet. Few write with her variety of emotional, intellectual, and musical muscle. This is simply a masterful collection of poems."