Announcements from the Planetarium

Dear Judith Arcana
Not only do I like your book, I love it. Could there ever be a collection more endearing? Great wit, music, and pacing. Vivid passionate hungers, all stitched through the nubby fabric of aging with gorgeous shining threads. We can wrap ourselves right up in these poems for courage and verve. Sincerely yours, Naomi Shihab Nye

Announcements from the Planetarium examines aging and changing, wisdom and memory, and includes poems from Arcana’s Mixtape Series and her Speculative Music Theory quartet.

According to Judith Vollmer, Judith Arcana’s poems [are] both familiar and refreshingly strange …. jagged elegies on ‘time available’ and ‘the short version, ’ dazzling crows, lonely streets, and mournful seers, with a hyper-realist eye on the past. Wisdom-riffs earned (wryly) ‘perhaps as compensation’ counterpoint her portraits of loss: of land, water, and the ‘grandmothers [who]/could move like flowers’ yet who, When we came here, […] would not come. And then: she slips away to an urgent world of ‘wind, shining like the flash inside/my skull-’ [to] revere and celebrate freedom ….