Saturday Review: “Found Magic” a review by J.S. Absher in NCLR Online Winter 2024
Joan Barasovska. Orange Tulips (2022)
Janis Harrington. How to Cut a Woman in Half (2022)
TW: Full review contains references to self-harm and -death
Applewhite finalist J.S. Absher reviews two recent full-length collections by poets who are well-established within the North Carolina poetry scene (and beyond). Absher starts the review stating, “Janis Harrington’s How to Cut a Woman in Half and Joan Barasovska’s Orange Tulips bring their readers intimate portrayals
of emotionally fraught situations through well-crafted, moving poems.”
How to is the first collection for Harrington, our current Applewhite Poetry contest winner. The story is of two sisters, comforting each other in grief. Absher closes his review of the poems with, “One of my favorite poems in the collection, “Prayer for My Sister,” describes the narrator’s attempt to cheer her sister by driving “to see the superbloom / promised by winter rainfall.” On the way, Annie is aloof and silent. But then they top
a hill:
Jeweled colors splash to the horizon: yellow fennel, poppies, verbena, blue lupine. Annie parks on the shoulder, opens the door, finds a path into the meadow. Shedding her jacket, she lifts her face to the sun. Let this temporary parole from distress remind her that beauty and joy still exist
The third book for Barasovska, Orange Tulips “is the poet’s coming-of-age story told through powerful confessional poems. After the introductory poem, it consists of fifty-four poems in three sections: “Too
Young,” “All Wrong,” and “Only Now.”” Absher speculates, “The poems in the middle section, “All Wrong,
confess painful events and states of mind that must have been grueling to write.”
Grief, mental illness, family trauma, what is fiction and what is poet’s lived experience? Absher says about both books, “They demonstrate how we can survive what we cannot intellectually solve.” Survival is key.
Read the entire review in the Online Winter 2024 issue out now! And order the books: Orange Tulips from Redhawk Publications and How to Cut a Women in Half from Able Muse Press.
