Joanna Nealon's poetry has always presented a fresh, unique voice to the world, and her new volume is no exception. She is a true seeker, combining great depth and a playful lightness in her work. She allows us to see all aspects of her striving - her hopes, her failures, her goals and achievements, her struggles. This gives her poetry authenticity and the ability to inspire others on their inner journey. It is a gift that we can return to and be moved by again and again. Michael Steinrueck, spoken word artist, director of Creative Speech Spring Valley, Farrier. Joanna Nealon's Sixth book moves grippingly through three parts: first, dismal misery; then, vigorous but premature attacks to free the self from its pain; and lastly a haunting and original image to celebrate a new human capacity, the thinking heart. "The heart is the lens/ For the real Sky, / Not the touted telescope" the final poem begins. It ends showing that cosmic beings look "long and deeply" through the lens, "Waiting, waiting, / For the heart to see." Nealon's surprising last line both closes her brilliant book and arouses readers and hearers to expect the heart/lens to see. Her new and bold image may be rich in meaning from a poet who has been blind since she was nineteen, decades ago. Gertrude Reif Hughes, Professor Emerita, Wesleyan University
About the Author: I grew up, the third of five children, in an old houseboat on Ash Creek in Bridgeport, Connecticut. At age seventeen I learned I had a serious eye condition and two years later I woke up one morning without my sight. It was only after this loss that I encountered so many inspiring people who would change my life completely, beginning with my husband, Kenneth Ingham, also newly blinded, who I met at The Carroll Center For The Blind in Newton, Massachusetts. I received a B.A. in French Literature from the University of Bridgeport. With the help and encouragement of my remarkable French professor, Dr. John Rassias, I won a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Sorbonne in Paris. There the first of our three children was born. Dr. Rassias went on to an extraordinary career at Dartmouth, where he is famous for his dynamic language-teaching techniques and his work as head of the Peace Corps for the Francophone countries in Africa. My published books are The Lie and I (1990), Poems of the Zodiac (1992), The Fourth Kingdom (1998), Living It (2004), and The Lesser Guardian (2013). Over the years, I have recited at Tapestry of Voices, Stone Soup, Ibbetson Street, Walden Pond, Chapter and Verse, Main Street Café, Brockton and Newton Library Series, and Norfolk and Bay State correctional institutions, Massachusetts. For my husband and me, the golden thread in our lives has been the on-going study of Anthroposophy, the work of Rudolf Steiner, 1861 to 1925. Anthroposophy speaks of the existence of an objective and comprehensible Spiritual World, accessible through direct experience, arising from the development of higher faculties of cognition, independent of the senses. Throughout the ages, special individualities have cultivated these faculties, powers which lie dormant in every human being. Some fruits of this knowledge are Waldorf Education, Camphill Villages (for special-needs children and adults), Bio-Dynamic Farming, Anthroposophical Medicine, and the newly inspired arts of Eurythmy and Speech Formation, as well as Drama, Painting, and Architecture. This brief bio might give the impression that my life is a light-filled tableau, when, like most lives, it is criss-crossed with deep shadows, chief among them a morbid sensitivity to all suffering. Of course, these very shadows, the "nights of the soul", can be the crux of growth, the dawning of self and world knowledge. Joanna Nealon