GlOrious

Price $14
Poetry
Available where books are sold
ISBN 0-9707186-4-0

CavanKerry Press
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Handler writes the full orchestral score of what is female. --- Afaa Michael Weaver

GlOrious is honesty, whole and pure, peeking its way from the dark corners of the heart, one that aches against the falsehoods about love so that it can live. This collection is the spirit speaking its own genesis, a shimmering. Handler goes inside the line as one mines the bones for their marrow to sing a crimson electric and bring back lives held in the mire of fear and doldrums. Her poems are full with a painter’s wish and a composer’s consummate vision of what music can come to be, the knowing—brave, beautiful, necessary. ---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 …have confronted Spirit with such fervent audacity and won. --- Maureen Seaton, The Boston Review

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Founder and publisher of CavanKerry Press, Joan Cusack Handler is a member of the resident faculty at The Robert Frost Place and sits on the board of governors of the Poetry Society of America. Glorious, her debut, reads like an open field verse bildungsroman of adulthood, taking the alternately first- and third-person protagonist from "bitching as I do about your selfishness" to "Inviting that cypress/ to watch the sun rise/ on the Hudson."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Publisher
Joan Cusack Handler's poems have appeared in Agni, Boston Review, Poetry East, Southern Humanities Review, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Feminist Studies and Wisconsin Review and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 1992, 1995, 1996, 1997 and 1998. Recipient of many awards, Ms. Handler was honored by the Boston Review, Chester H. Jones Foundation, the Eve of St. Agnes Competition, Roberts Writing Awards, Gloucester County College and the Allen Ginsberg Competitions.

From Amazon.com
A WISE AND VISIONARY WORK OF ART, November 15, 2004
Reviewer: Sondra Gash - See all my reviews
Joan Handler's collection of poems GLOrious is a kind of bildungsroman in which a woman discovers her spiritual strengths, but only after learning and unlearning the influence of her early experiences. In the opening poem, Pageant of Rages, a woman and her mother-in-law stand in front of New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine "spitting hate/ feeling grateful /and loving each other for it." Understanding the euphoria that comes from expressing oneself fully - even one's rage - the woman says, "It is pure genius and a running away of the heart that frees us." Here is the central theme - the life force - of Handler's daring work.

As a good Catholic girl, this same woman (for these poems follow a narrative thrust as the main character moves through time) has consumed - and been consumed by - Church doctrines, among them: "Thou shalt NOT be angry." She has tried so hard not to be bad but she feels like a sinner. At twelve, she still wets the bed, making her, in her own eyes, dirty: "She drags around shame like a dirty old pee stained blanket." At 6 feet, 2 inches, "barely thirteen and/ tall /as a Woman, but/she has no breasts/two peas on an ironing board!" No wonder "she dreams of hiding." Handler manages to create a character both specific and universal. I grew up short and Jewish yet identify with her plight.

When eventually the woman begins to confront her demons and deities - fear, pain, God, the rigidity of her upbringing, her flawed relationship with her body - she does not look away; she does not flinch. These poems are often brutally honestly, sometimes surreal, always full of passion. The narrative models a life lived audaciously. I admire Handler's determination, her insistence, really, on taking the hard, truer path and this intense psychological quest is what gives the book its largesse of spirit. The varied visual shapes of these poems reflect the complexity of the challenges with which she grapples. Yet her work is lucid; she writes with unusual grace and finesse.

I love the finale. No longer hiding, the woman has moved past the legacy of restriction and shame, beyond anger, thus claiming her authentic self and a haven in the world. Unlike the first poem, Pageant of Rages, in which two women hurl insults at each other, now joy and freedom are expressed in images of beauty and acceptance: the sea, the woods, a new comfort in relation to God and family. In the Mirror/At the Beach is a wildly imaginative fantasy in which two female characters, a woman and her angel, turn into winged creatures. As they rise above the white caps of the sea, transcendence, Handler seems to be saying, is within reach.