Handler writes the full orchestral score of what is female.
Laid forth in six sections, the 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. Combining the confessional candor of a Robert Lowell with the ecstatic modernist of a Allen Ginsberg or Charles Bukowski, Joan Cusack Handler has fashioned a unique voice as a poet.
Afaa Michael Weaver, Poet & Prose writer
Reviews
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.
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.
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.
The Boston Review
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