Hard-Earned Wisdom: Two Poets on Small Ecstasies & Difficult Loves

Barbra Nightingale is a poet, painter, founding associate editor of South Florida Poetry Journal, and jewelry designer. She is the author of three previous poetry collections, including Singing in the Key of L, Alphalexia, and The Geometry of Dreams. her latest, Spells & Other Ways of Flying: Poems (Kelsay Books) was described by author Julie Marie Wade as a “collection of wry and wise poems, as far-flung as they are probing. These poems trace ‘our various angers’; they honor ‘the endless rain / that falls inside our] hearts].’ By the time our speaker confides in us, ‘Nothing I ever did was safe, / nothing was ever in vain,’ we don’t just believe her – we applaud.”

Deborah DeNicola is a poet, essayist, and editor. She is the author of a previous collection, Original Human, and a spiritual memoir, The Future That Brought Her Here: Memoir of a Call to Awaken. Her poems and reviews have been published in many anthologies and journals, such as North American Review, The Antioch Review, Fiction International, Nimrod International Journal, The Journal, Boston Book Review, and Orion. In The Impossible: Poems (Kelsay Books) “her poems … are prayers and incantations of myth, love, desire and transcendental euphoria,” notes poet Leslie Ullman. The centerpiece of the collection is a 21-part poem about her father, a chief of surgery, and his death by overdose. DeNicola, “explores landscapes of her own passion, her mother’s decline, and her father’s death and imagined afterlife through the eyes of a true visionary,” writes Ullman. “These poems, extraordinary in their hard-earned wisdom, transform the personal into something beyond universal.”