Synopses & Reviews
"Anna Journey's poetry is really magical." —David Lynch, director of
Blue Velvet and creator of
Twin Peaks
"Anna Journey's second collection of poems is wonderful and brings something precise and wild out of a vivid night, an imagery that finds its own necessary music, like sudden isolated birdsongs at dawn. The multiplying shadows of the mind are made exterior here, surprisingly illustrated with anecdotal thought. And Dante no longer concludes that all lovers are martyrs. I'm so happy to have this work in my life." —Norman Dubie, author of The Volcano
"Anna Journey, in her new book of poems, Vulgar Remedies, creates an alchemical self whose shimmering limbic / alembic lyrics distill the mysterious terrors of childhood, the dangerous passions of adults, into her own honey-dusk 'voodun': protective, purified to gold. Poetry is always a time machine: here we are invisible travelers to a bewitched past, a beautifully occluded future. These poems are erotic, vertiginous, revelatory, their dazzling lyric force reflecting profound hermetic life." —Carol Muske-Dukes, author of Twin Cities
Review
"Journey confronts her ghosts in unexpected places....But her world is far from grim; wrought with dazzling chimerical characters and an intense awareness of the body — its maturation and decay, orgasm and metabolism — her language is bold and bewitchingly erotic....She convincingly rearranges time and space into her own associative patterns, just as she rearranges the English language into her own virtuosic idiom." Maggie Millner, The Iowa Review
Review
"Sifting through the detritus of recalled and imagined landscapes, the poems in Vulgar Remedies seek violent metamorphosis through sensory, often bodily engagement....Marrying fact and memory with macabre imagination and erotic disintegration, Journey achieves a poetry of place that honors the complexity of the contemporary consciousness." Southeast Review
Review
"The cover of Anna Journey's new collection of poems, Vulgar Remedies, is an apt metaphor for the kind of poetry she writes. The cover image, 'House #3,' by Francesca Woodman, seems to depict a young woman materializing in a sort of magical, alchemical process in an abandoned, dilapidated house. In just this way, Journey's poetry partakes of transformation, the magic of dreams, and a nostalgia for a past that may never have occurred." Chamber Four
About the Author
Anna Journey is the author of
If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in
The Southern Review, American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships in poetry from Yaddo and the National Endowment for the Arts.
http://annajourney.com