Just This

As a depicter of hardscrabble, northern Vermont, Judith Janoo is all but peerless. She is regional in the same sense that Frost-and so much compelling poetry-essentially is. She's no mere a provincial, however, than her famous New England predecessor: within a few pages, she goes from gimlet-eyed renderings of her own upcountry locale-see "Men at the General Store," say- to a place where locale means something utterly different-see "Chiang Mai, City of Temples." But although her eye for eloquent detail is stunning, she can be a brilliant allegorist too, as in "Can't Steal a Beat from Our Swing," but an allegorist so deft that the punch in the gut comes ex post facto. Stunning.

-Sydney Lea, Vermont's Poet Laureate (2011-2015) Here

These are poems of precise, measured tenderness, poems that hold loss and beauty in careful balance, poems that are composed in the musical sense-each word snug in its exacting place. Judith Janoo speaks eloquently to her own life but also for the earth, the creatures, for those who are gone and those who hope to live amid the onslaught of human dereliction. This is a book to spend unhurried hours with. Her poems-so attentive to the varied passages of time-linger and resonate.

-Baron Wormser, Maine's Poet Laureate (2000-2006) Unidentified Sighing Objects

Just This is a collection to treasure. Judith Janoo draws in and holds the reader again and again. Quiet, skillfully made poems, deeply permeated by glimpses of grief, love and wonder: the mingled beat of jazz dancing and desire, Down East fishermen, salty chowder, and the cry of a loon over Passamaquoddy Bay.

-Reeve Lindbergh, author of Two Lives

Judith Janoo's Just This will call to mind what first drew you to contemporary poetry,
what you have looked for ever since and too seldom found. This is a beautiful collection, a world seen in the grain of sand that is one woman's poignant life, redolent of northern seascapes and southern Indian cooking, the "Vivaldi of falling leaves" and "the September in men."

-Garret Keizer, author of The World Pushes Back