GlOrious

Foreword by Afaa Michael Weaver

Chicago Book and Media Show Honorable Mention 2003

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.

As the founder of CavanKerry Press, Joan Cusack Handler is a poet and memoirist, a psychologist in clinical practice, and a blogger for PsychologyToday.com (“Of Art and Science”). Her poems have been widely published and have received awards from The Boston Review and five Pushcart nominations. A Bronx native, she has four published books with CavanKerry –GlOrious (2003), The Red Canoe: Love In Its Making (2008), Confessions of Joan the Tall: A Memoir (2012), and Orphans (2016) – and currently resides in Brooklyn and the East Hamptons. Joan is married to a great man and fellow psychologist, has a loving son and daughter-in-law, and two amazing granddaughters.

SAD

…    is a tunne
linside my chest:
hot, tight, small
and  dark.  Not
t o t a lly black,
e nough    gray
for  me  to  see
the s h a d ows
I make a l o ne
here:the beaten
calf, theburned
b r a n c h e s,
the bruisedgrey
stone. No, it is
not enough for
Sad to sit here
qu i etly a lone
—content to be
left alone. No,
it must insist it
-self into every
place that jOy
lives or recalls.
G  r  e  e  d  y
for something
so knotted  &
small), it takes
m   o    r   e

GlOrious takes the broad and dangerous campaign into the heart of betrayal and loss, dangerous inasmuch as humanity would rather not believe the deepest depths of its own cruelty, the way it seeks its own ending by murdering its promise. In this shimmering collection, Joan Handler shows us the gems that come from pain in the fragile fibers of her spirit, as the poems fall like pearls fleeing their binding string to be reborn . . . The spirit of the book lives as the poet lives, seeking and then knowing and seeking again.
— Afaa Michael Weaver

Crowned by the protean, sensuous language that whiplashes across its pages, GlOrious is glorious . . . With her sinewy humor, bravura honesty and fierce excess, Handler becomes a warrior goddess of the psycho-poetics she champions. Her canny insights and uncanny intuition reinvigorate our world.
— Molly Peacock

Joan Cusack Handler . . . writes of the body’s unapologetic continuing . . . with a largesse that volleys between tender and roaring. Her lines blow wide, her metaphors tree tall as she roots the whole oaken structure in her signature loamy sexuality . . . She renders the psychological spiritual and back again . . . Few writers . . . have dared this kind of generosity, and . . . confronted Spirit with such fervent audacity and won.
— Maureen Seaton, The Boston Review

September 2003
106 pp
Trade paper – 8 X 8
$14
978-0-9707186-4-8