Janet Joyner’s varied poems include lyrical descriptions of the natural world and draw deft portraits of people and the complicated connections between us. Waterborne is threaded with vivid images and insights.

Praise for Waterborne:

Sometimes they are splendid, such as fallen leaves in such a mass / it seemed the sky had turned sea/and spilled the sun at our feet ; sometimes wry, as when the wife of God begins by saying, I could have told you it would end / this way, and ends by suggesting that God Give the grasses another chance ; and sometimes tragic, as in her extraordinary poem, What the Egg Knows, showing us the kid hung on a fence post to watch dawn die over Laramie, how he is no different from you or me, like any creature swimming or striding / in search of his bliss.

—Ellen Bass, author of Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love

Waterborne is number nine in the Holland Series, published by Logan House.

Janet Joyner grew up in Marion, South Carolina. The town sits in a region of midland and coastal plains crisscrossed by rivers and streams. These rivers, many still known by the names of natives, were the first avenues inland for colonial ancestors who left their names to her childhood playmates and their places—towns, counties, rivers. Place and name, the currency of belonging, are essential to the poet’s encounter with the world.

Professor of French Language and Literature at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts until her retirement in 1994, Joyner is the winner of the Poetry Society of South Carolina’s 2010 Dubose and Dorothy Heyward Poetry Prize. Her poems have won distinctions in Bay Leaves of the North Carolina Poetry Council, and Flying South ’14, and her “Cicadas Thrumming” was anthologized in The Southern Poetry Anthology: volume vii: North Carolina (2015). Her short stories have appeared in The Crescent Review and Flying South. She is the translator of Le Dieu désarmé, by Luc-François Dumas. Waterborne is her first collection of poems.

Waterborne
Janet Joyner
Perfect Paperback: 81 pages
Logan House (January 2016) $12
ISBN: 978-0991013944