Rogue Apostle
by Mary Jane Nealon
ISBN: 1-884800-31-9
paper, 60 pages, $13.95
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" I understand storms, the way love moves / within them, writes Mary Jane Nealon in this book filled with dark agreements and luminous contradictions. She has learned in suffering what she teaches in song. Rogue Apostle is a rich book andrarer these daysa wise one."
J. D. McClatchy
" Emancipated in the mess of it is an apt description of Mary Jane Nealons relation to the world she describes with such stringent accuracy, toughness, and compassion. I can imagine Chekhov reading these poems, especially the ones that recount her experience as a nurse, and nodding his head at the odd surreal rightness of the scenes in the ward, the operating room, the pathologists lab, and the morgue. Most poets write about the body at a literary remove, but Nealon knows its exact heft and weight, its resilience and ultimate frailty. When Nealon speaks of a legs disarticulationthe technical term for dismembermentthe project of these poems comes clear: to articulate, in her spare and eloquently plainspoken way, the traumatic marriage between healing and pain."
Tom Sleigh
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