Poetry Porch Announcement 2019

Kelsay Books announces the publication of
Take and Receive, a collection of poems by Joyce Wilson.

The poems in Joyce Wilson’s Take and Receive combine a remarkable clarity of insight with a honed sense of the possibilities inherent in formal verse. In “The Envy of the Gods,” a poem about married life, the perfect iambic line “We bought a house that no one else would want” offers a sudden, sure look at the couple in question, united in choosing what has been overlooked, in finding their own way. With geographies as close as the poet’s own garden and as far away as Egypt, Wilson immerses the reader in the things she has seen and lived. This collection is — to borrow a phrase from her title poem — a “tonic against grief,” bracing and brave.
— Jennifer Barber, author of Works on Paper

A variation on the phrase “give and take,” Joyce Wilson’s Take and Receive, at first, appears to be about gender dynamics, but it is ultimately about the nature of power and perception. In addition to being a master formal poet, a scholar, and an editor, Joyce Wilson is a gardener. She knows the overarching plot there. Wilson is someone who gives and receives, but also takes. There is a paradoxical reason we like the predatory stories, as in her award-winning poem “The Speckled Hawk,” which suggests “That might explain divisions in her ways –– / The softest down, the sharpest knife, / The fierceness in the cry that she betrays.” In daily life, most of our challenges are more subtle, and that’s why we need Joyce Wilson, with her sense of pattern and skill: and her memorable, wise voice.
— Kim Bridgford, author of A Crown for Ted and Sylvia

Praise for The Springhouse:

Like the springhouse that gives her collection its title, Joyce Wilson’s work offers both bracing freshness and mystery. In her poems about animals and insects, she honors the beauty of the natural world; and in her moving poems about her sister, she acknowledges its pain. Wilson richly rewards her readers’ attention by her own patient fidelity to her subjects.
— Timothy Steele, author of Toward the Winter Solstice

Information about READINGS.

 

 

TAKE AND RECEIVE
by Joyce Wilson

Kelsay Books
502 S 1040 E, A119
American Fork, Utah 84003

Publishing date: May 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-950462-00-1
Cover illustration courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
$17.00 paper

Contact Kelsay Books online to order online.
You may also purchase a copy from the author here.



 

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Commentary from Joan Soble

On Take and Receive: There’s so much here about tempting fate (there are Greek gods and other gods here) by having a lot, about the things that protect and don’t protect us, about that sense of distance and vulnerability that are always so much present, or nearly present, in our most important relationships, and about learning to suffer and to heal. Our most painful moments are the ones in which we realize how much we have — and we’re terribly fearful that we’re on the verge of losing something or someone — those feelings are as much about fearing abandonment as they are about not knowing how we’ll carry water and carry on.
        One of my favorite lines is “unique together in this desert place.” Wilson describes bounty in this collection — so much to enjoy, sense, and relish. But that bounty does not have the power to protect us — we can lose bounty. So on some level, we exist in this desert place, and we’re unique: wife and husband can love each other, but they’re still separate and different — “Each will be delicious in its own way” — and that war/harmony combination that keeps them fighting for peace — those tensions are evident throughout the collection, poignant and real. Maybe unique beings must always contend with each other some of the time, much as they might cherish their own and each other’s uniqueness. Thus it is with the Cairo poems. All twelve of them are such an important part of this book, and such a startling, wonderful way of ending, because they introduce what is familiar to the traveler and open up connections between freedom and danger in being alone.
        Working with form — rhyme schemes and rhythm — makes its appeal here on so many levels. It’s like the poems are breathing, moving forward, and taking us with them gently, even when their content takes us out of our personal thinking and breathing rhythms.
        The last stanza of “The Clock Tower” —the whole idea of learning to suffer and to heal. We often know or suspect we're suffering, we try to gauge whether we’re healing, but the idea that these are things we learn to do — that’s a new idea to me that makes me wonder if it’s harder for us to learn to do these than to do other things. I'm thnking about this: that the book’s about learning to suffer and learning to heal, what all who love and try to be themselves have to do.

— Joan Soble, Career Educator and Blogger

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    Joyce Wilson is editor of The Poetry Porch, a literary magazine on the Internet, which has been on-line since 1997. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals, among them American Arts Quarterly, Grey Sparrow, Ibbetson Street Magazine, and Main Street Rag. She has published a full-length poetry collection, The Etymology of Spruce, and a chapbook, The Springhouse (also with Finishing Line Press). She and her husband have lived in the same house in Scituate, on the South Shore of Boston, since 1975. (Author photo by John Goldie.)

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