This book prompts the reader to recognize feelings and behavior systems, some conscious and some unconscious. Through poetry, the author illuminates emotional experiences, from grief and doubt to joy and faith. A major theme concerns man’s insensitivity and self-centeredness, which deafens and blinds, setting up walls of non-communication. Such walls preclude sharing the best that exists in each of us - with each other. Through scholarly research and cases of diagnosis and treatment, she presents options leading toward solutions to life’s challenges. The author’s insight as a psychotherapist informs her writing as a poet, and her poetic perception enriches her work as a compassionate psychotherapist. JoAn Luban Gewirtz writes with a sincere intensity. Whether it be about the loss of a child, the search for God, or about love, her poems reveal images that are vivid and startlingly real. One feels a keen poignancy in the face of a child’s death or the death of a man like John Lennon. Then, too, we feel the sweet happiness of a shared love in such poems as Finding Each Other,
The Radiance of Love and If Not to You. Her poetic gems examine the happy/sad nature of man’s essential humanity. - Amy Bursky, Co-founder of the Main Line Poetry Center, Montgomery County, PA. I am a devotee of poetry and I find JoAn’s work to be most engrossing. She has the ability to catch the attention-tone of the reader. - Rabbi Gerald I. Wolpe, Har Zion Temple, Penn Valley, PA