"We think back through our mothers if we are women," Virginia Woolf declares in A Room of One's Own, and certainly Joan Baranow embraces a woman-centered poetics in A Slight Thing, Happiness. In this volume of poetry, Baranow explores the many phases of motherhood, beginning with her struggle with infertility treatments, toxemia of pregnancy, and the premature births of her sons. The poems that open the book narrate those early days of disappointment, hope, and gratitude with vivid images of nature as the poet negotiates her way through a harsh clinical environment. br In section II Baranow looks back to women who have gone before, searching for guidance ..

Poetry. Joan Baranow's powerful new collection of poems, IN THE NEXT LIFE, reminds us that it is our passage through this life that constantly shapes the next. Our place in and passages through the natural world reflect both the questions of childhood and those few wisdoms we hope to share as adults. Always, the speaker of these poems ('closer to the end than to birth, dreaming of death' she says) recalls a boy's question: 'How does light climb the tree?' In these elegant poems of daily mortal passage, Joan Baranow is also asking, in every line, how might we, each of us, slowly climb that light? These are poems of constancy and moral courage."--David St. John ..

Poetry. STILL YOU gathers together poems that invite us into private rooms of suffering and solace. In these profoundly personal stanzas, we recognize our own encounters with nature's inevitable blows. By turns we fall ill, we recover, we care for a loved one, we prepare for loss. At these times poetry can open the door to the sickroom and offer a potent physic for the isolation that comes with illness. Here you will find a wife's fierce resistance to cancer's attack as well as the courage to accept a feared diagnosis. You will find poems of humor, joy, gratitude, and consolation. Ultimately, a resilient spirit binds us together. As poet Gail Tierney says, whate ..

For more than a decade The Healing Art of Writing conference has sought to strengthen compassionate understanding between healthcare providers and those who seek a state of well-being beyond the reach of surgery or pharmacology. Together, the participants share the belief that being cured of disease is not the same thing as being healed, and that a practice of expressive writing promotes both spiritual and physical healing. The writings presented at the 2012 conference, collected here in Tell Me Again, are a powerful testament to that belief. Within these pages you will hear, again and again, words of truth, words that uplift, words that heal. ..