Life on a small midwestern farm is the genesis of many of the poems in DEAD HORSES. Unsentimental and realistic, they celebrate an enduring involvement with horses (riding, breeding, foaling, and racing) and offer a tough-minded look at the vagaries of rural existence.

Dead Horses

Literature & Fiction

Colby, Joan

Poetry

FutureCycle Press

Winner of the 2013 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize. David Pichaske writes in the Foreword to this collection: "Thirty-five years is a long time in anyone’s career—long enough to see how things turned out. Long enough to allow us to draw some conclusions. Long enough to trace the arc of a career...." Joan Colby: Selected Poems represents a body of work "underwritten by an intelligence itself as fiery as it is sharp" (Philip Dacey), "both loud and haunting, both vivid and quiet as a falling stone" (Christina Zawadiwsky). Includes selections from Blue Woman Dancing in the Nerve (1979), Chagall Poems (1980), Dream Tree (1980), The Boundary Waters (1982), How the Sky Begins to Fall (1982), The Atrocity Book (1986), The Lonely Hearts Killers (1986), and Dead Horses (2012).

Joan Colby: Selected Poems

The Wingback Chair, Colby's fourteenth volume of poetry, contains new poems that illustrate significant moments in her life as well as the inexorable progression of her poetry. The subjects range from the personal elements of the title poem to the historical, social, and cultural interweavings of the textile poems.

The Wingback Chair

CARNIVAL celebrates the quirky, the odd, and an audience of participants and voyeurs. The first section contains linked poems that focus on small towns’ annual festivals. The second, “Sideshows,” looks at fictional, mythic, and real characters from a speculative angle. The third, “The Traveling Circus,” centers on one of mankind’s oldest entertainments. CARNIVAL unleashes a vibrant and revolutionary spirit in poems that favor a skewed vision: sometimes effervescent, often dark.

Carnival

Years drain the energy from some poets, but Joan Colby's work is as fresh and creative as ever, perhaps more so. Ribcage showcases the poet's rich imagination on subjects attempting to reconcile body and mind. The first section of the book ("The Body in Question") extends metaphors from various body parts (heart, blood, nerves, finger and hands, etc.), and the last section ("The Mind at Play") continues with a rich lyric and imagery often sung from a mystic sensibility. Humor and irony are also part of the poet's toolbox, as in "Chewed to Meat Hooks" in which the purposes of the hand are revealed: Which leads us to the signifier/Insolent as a poker. To be used/For motorists who cut me off. Particularly in the last section, the imagery carves itself a place in the memory because it shocks with profound truth, as in my favorite, "The Nature of Freedom," which begins with "An open door is terrifying." Thankfully, the poet has opened doors into views we need to see. -Robert S. King, author of Developing a Photograph of God

Ribcage

Glass Lyre Press

In JOYRIDING TO NIGHTFALL, written in her eighth decade of life, Joan Colby explores resistance to the obvious and the heartless while insisting that defining beauty in all its masques is the end game. These poems powerfully address the universal elements of weather and nature as well as the human interventions of conflict and choice.

Joyriding to Nightfall

"A collection of poetry inspired by birds"--

The Kingdom of Birds

Poetry Box Select

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Books by Colby, Joan