Poets Joan Barasovska & Ashley Lumpkin

The poems in Joan Barasovska’s Orange Tulips are so powerfully teeming with visceral life, the inattentive reader might be forgiven for overlooking their consummate craft. Each poem in this collection is distinguished by the honesty of its details, its fully-rendered tone, and its careful formal design. The book itself is just that: a book, each of whose poems adds to the unfolding arc of narrative, never belabored but always fully present, anchoring and enlarging the individual utterances, until the whole is indeed larger than the sum of its parts. The thrill of reading Orange Tulips is multi-dimensional: Each poem stands on its own, but each participates in the unfolding narrative. Here are rage and grief, loss and pure bewilderment, enacted through a lens of honesty and love. Orange Tulips is a significant achievement.

—Michael Hettich, author of Systems of Vanishing, The Frozen Harbor, Bluer and More Vast, To Start an Orchard, The Mica Mine

Joan Barasovska lives in Orange County, North Carolina. For thirty-five years she has had a private practice in academic therapy, working with children with academic and psychological challenges. Joan cohosted a poetry series at the independent bookstore Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill and serves on the Board of the North Carolina Poetry Society. In 2020 she was nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. Joan is the author of the chapbooks Birthing Age (Finishing Line Press, 2018)and Carrying Clare (Main Street Rag, 2022).

The poems in Ashley Lumpkin's stunning new collection Genesis sustain a tender and often gut wrenching conversation with figures and events from the Christian tradition and her own family.