Judas Ear - by Anna Journey (Paperback)

About the Book

"The poems in Anna Journey's new collection, The Judas Ear, resurrect a host of vanished people and places, often through marvelous Ovidian metamorphoses that are as natural in the gritty tableaux of Richmond, Virginia, as in the luminous shape-shifting vistas of folktale or myth. A restaurant server donates her eggs to a fertility agency for rent money and morphs into the golden goose, a pair of art-school roommates communicate through a private language based on Renaissance artist Arcimboldo's invertible paintings that change from portrait to still life, and a vintage pink couch sourced from a meningitis clinic transforms from an object of domestic comfort to a viral threat. Journey's music is lush and visceral, her humor warm and sly, and her sensibility metes out tenderness and grotesquerie in equal parts. Taking its title from the ear-shaped mushroom named for a biblical betrayer, The Judas Ear offers poems that can shift suddenly from wit to pathos, from seductiveness to danger, with a generosity of vision that is at once wise and revelatory"--

Book Synopsis

Anna Journey's The Judas Ear resurrects a host of vanished people and places, often through marvelous Ovidian metamorphoses that seem as natural in the gritty tableaux of Richmond, Virginia, as in the luminous shape-shifting vistas of folktale or myth. Journey's music is lush and visceral, her humor warm and sly, and her sensibility metes out tenderness and grotesquerie in equal parts. Like the ear-shaped mushroom named for a biblical betrayer, the poems in The Judas Ear can shift suddenly from wit to pathos, from seductiveness to danger, with a generosity of vision that is at once wise and revelatory.

Review Quotes

"On the rotting bark of the tree from which the faithless disciple hanged himself, or so they say: a mushroom called 'the Judas ear.' Perfectly edible. 'Risen flesh, shape-shifting, everlasting, ' as the author of these beautiful poems has the wisdom to teach us over and over again. The ever-ingenious biosphere is Journey's tutelary spirit, luminous figuration her genius, and narrative restored to its proper essence her discovery mode: inspiring elementals all."--Linda Gregerson, author of Canopy

"Between first and second readings of The Judas Ear, I could not shake Baba Yaga's scent; a bearded, naked potter; and the biodegradable funeral suit of Luke Perry. Even now, Anna Journey's lines echo like lines of a song. The final word is 'blooming.' The poems are big, rangy, expansive in Whitmanesque, democratic ways. They have a narrative charisma but maintain Dickinson's perversity, independence. Journey is as much a storyteller as a poet. Few write with her variety of emotional, intellectual, and musical muscle. This is simply a masterful collection of poems."

--Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

About the Author

Anna Journey is the author of the poetry collections The Atheist Wore Goat Silk, Vulgar Remedies, and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series, and the essay collection An Arrangement of Skin. She teaches at the University of Southern California.