In this soulful debut collection of poems that recounts her early life in rural Maine, the wretched place she called home, Judith Ann Levison tells of an isolated and introverted childhood of poverty, abuse, and sorrow that accompanied this childhood. There is a sorrow without a name, she writes. The poet’s strength lies in the surreal imagery that evokes fairy tales, fantasy, dreams, alternative and imagined realities. At the end of the collection, however, there is irony and the acknowledgment that I am no more than I am at this moment. But this moment is the accumulation of one’s life, whether beautiful or tragic. Julie Cooper-Fratrik, Author of The Slow Separations
A compelling collection of poems challenges our sensibilities. Judith Ann Levison’s Cruel Roses summons the reader’s presence as a painful childhood is re-examined by the adult victim. The conflict of reflection and dissociation is revealed through unique imagery and metaphor via the rejection, fear, stress and solitude of a child who must process and find reason in this pained existence. We are enticed to revisit our painful childhood events, gaining insight into the psyche of unloved, unwanted children. We wonder why this adult survives, prospers and finds purpose defying this crucible.
Paul Gelineau, Editor
About fifty years ago The New Yorker magazine published a short poem of Judy’s called Mary Shellmic, and since then she has continued to write poems of incisive and penetrating observations. Her background on a coastal Maine back road has been essential as those experiences and memories shaped her way of expression. It’s her unique ability to use words in a very personal way that gives her poetry strength. I have been fortunate to have read her poems as they have been written over the years. As the times and locations have evolved, her wording and images have always been infused with metaphors that are provoking, challenging, wry, sometimes ironic. Her subjects vary but are always clearly personal. Reading them makes you distinctly aware of where she came from and how she’s lived, and lives.
Read each slowly, one and then another. Put them down, then pick one up and let her words and images expand in your mind. You’ll come to know a poet with rural roots enriched by time. Judith Levison’s poems are geodes.
Peter Green, Mentor
