Joanne Growney

Red Has No Reason Joanne Growney

A marvelous intelligence, mindful and clear-eyed, governs the inscape of these poems where "strangeness/is so usual nothing's strange" - nor does that commanding presence hesitate a moment before welcoming magicians, who "train as pole-vaulters do - tedious, lonely practice/ broken by a moment's flight." It is such flights we witness here, increasingly aware once again of a sum greater than its parts, of moments seemingly disparate that gradually become a mosaic catching the range of a whole life, richly lived and examined with meticulous candor.
William Pitt Root, poetry editor of CutThroat: A Journal
of the Arts, and author of eleven collections of poems

JoAnne Growney is a mathematician and a poet - a striking combination. Her poems belie the old saws about the two cultures. Red Has No Reason shows us how we can be precise and intuitive, heady and heartful.
Jan Heller Levi, poet, author of Skyspeak, editor of
A Muriel Rukeyser Reader

Red Has No Reason is a collection that takes the reader into a world with a kaleidoscope view - one that shifts, and dazzles and mystifies, despite best efforts to impose order. Her pairing of this red, raw stuff of life with mathematical precision creates a poetry collection to rival the mystical allure of the aurora.
Jerry Wemple, poet, author of The Civil War in Baltimore
and You Can See It from Here, co-editor of Common
Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, editor of
Watershed: the Journal of the Susquehanna