Crossing the Great Divide

Author of the recent and critically acclaimed memoir, I Hear Voices, Jean Feraca is also an award-winning poet. Her second collection of poems, Crossing the Great Divide, has not been widely available until now but forms a fascinating counterpoint to the story of emergence she reveals in her memoir. Brilliant, passionate, sexual, these poems travel into mythic ancestral landscapes in southern Italy and Sicily, on a psychic journey of self-discovery, sometimes luminous, sometimes harrowing, leading ultimately to deliverance, as in the title poem of the collection:

 

“I shall live out my life rejoicing

ribboning under the jagged shadow of the hawk.

 

There is no reason for this joy

eagle-bald, knifing through me like a canyon.

 

There is nothing in this landscape that defines me.”

(copyright Jean Feraca. All rights reserved.)