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Poetry. “Intimacy presupposes a certain innocence. The intimacy in Joanna Straughn’s poems sees the small, vital world on the scale of its innocence, with eyes that discipline not only the precision of the detail but the subtlety of its rendering”–Stanley Plumly. “Joanna Straughn’s poems exist in the liminal, a place of uncommon delicacy and quiet haunting. Here is an imagination that describes a robin’s egg as ‘sky fallen to earth as a hailstone’ and conveys ‘what a bird is to a flower.’ Like watercolors, these poems are filled with sure, yet translucent, strokes. ‘What good is love that isn’t portable?’ asks the speaker in one poem, vowing in another poem to ‘lie down / In the heart’s granary.’ Joanna Straughn’s gift is to awaken us to the danger of a raindance inviting a tornado rather than rain and console us by celebrating the difference”–Natasha Saje.