In JOYRIDING TO NIGHTFALL, written in her eighth decade of life, Joan Colby explores resistance to the obvious and the heartless while insisting that defining beauty in all its masques is the end game. These poems powerfully address the universal elements or weather and nature as well as the human interventions of conflict and choice.
CARNIVAL celebrates the quirky, the odd, and an audience of participants and voyeurs. The first section contains linked poems that focus on small towns' annual festivals. The second, "Sideshows," looks at fictional, mythic, and real characters from a speculative angle. The third, "The Traveling Circus," centers on one of mankind's oldest entertainments. CARNIVAL unleashes a vibrant and revolutionary spirit in poems that favor a skewed vision: sometimes effervescent, often dark.
The poems in Joan Colby's chapbook BROKE were engendered by an accident in which several of the author's bones were broken. This led her to contemplate aspects of the word "broke." Due to a badly fractured wrist, the poems were laboriously printed with the non-dominant hand, which captures how the fact of brokenness, like the word itself, insinuates both damage and repair. Ironically, X rays of the tension-wire hardware used to secure Colby's shattered kneecap were eerily identical to the symbol for extinction shown on the chapbook's cover.
An abecedary of poems by the late, great Joan Colby