Still Life with Judas & Lightning

Poetry. 2015 Oregon Book Award Finalist. Following "the caravan of mystery" through the point of view of many characters, Dawn Diez Willis's first collection enacts a pilgrimage into many voices. Ruminating on an everyday darkness, these poems lean toward the light within the fierce vitality of existence. With musical lusciousness and deeply felt images, STILL LIFE WITH JUDAS & LIGHTNING unfolds like a peony, the lives like petals forming a single experience of complex beauty.

"Dawn Diez Willis's STILL LIFE WITH JUDAS & LIGHTNING is a quietly startling book and a strong debut. In poem after poem, we are confronted with characters in moments of spiritual agon—a contest between the manifestation of a good in themselves and their admission of an in-dwelling potential for small yet damaging evils as well. In their vividness of scene, their stark presentations of characters stripped down to their souls, these poems put me in mind of Ai's Cruelty, yet Willis's book might better be called Mercy for the counterpoint of compassion that radiates in every line she writes. Her characters are daedal birds swerving under judgment from a secular god, pinioned in forgiveness from a sacred one."—Garrett Hongo, author of Coral Road

"The social vision of these poems is broad and empathetic—but also precise. The intensity of Diez Willis's gaze gives STILL LIFE WITH JUDAS & LIGHTNING a disarming immediacy."—Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men

"Each poem carries the clarity of a tragic vision applied to ordinary events, focused with a painter's eye for depth, texture, and shading. There is a profound sadness mingled with love that glimmers through and between the engagement of lyric with narrative. It is a remarkable, magnificent collection that calls for a certain tough tenderness in the reader, for a love of the beautiful and glorious to be found in all broken and wounded things."—Gina Rae Foster, author of heart speech this and Beautiful Laceration

"A smile is a scattering of gulls and palm trees cut the sky with silhouettes. These are just a few of the many images in Dawn Diez Willis's STILL LIFE WITH JUDAS & LIGHTNING that will literally steal your breath. You'll find here the seething distance of an observer give way to cherished truths, more revealing than any confession. Here are the utterances that make the knowable an intimate encounter with the unknowable."—Major Jackson, author of Holding Company