Temporary Beast

Interrogations, self-interrogations, examinations, cross-examinations, evocations—all thesemodes participate in these poems that actively refuse definition, since the poet, Joanna Solfrian, is inpursuit of her conscience, the one that asks about being alive, being dead, being a mother, being atree. I could say, “You name it,” but she does in her distinctly marvelous, nodding-to-Lorca fashion,truly keeping the reader on metaphorical yet actual toes, reveling (perhaps the most crucial word) inthe powers of imagination that adhere to genuine poetry.—Baron Wormser, author of The HistoryHotelJoanna Solfrian’s Temporary Beast shows a high mastery of surprising images and insights in poemafter poem. A sharp, enviable intelligence permeates all her lines; the poems push into the mysteriesof earthly and mystical love, but adhere to a rubric of recognition: the self in the feminine, the self inthe gravitational force of experience, and the self of possession and obsession. The speaker has anaffe