GlOrious is honesty, whole and pure, peeking its way from the dark corners of a loneliness in the heart, one that aches against the falsehoods about love so that it can live.  This collection is the spirit speaking its own exegesis, 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

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

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