On Friday, May 4, at 5 p.m., I'll be part of the NYU Creative Writing Program Alumni Reading at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House. Please come if you can!



The Lessons is the winner of the Gerald Cable Book Award and is published by Silverfish Review Press. You can order The Lessons via the Small Press Distribution website (recommended) and Amazon. You can also order
a copy through your local bookstore.


"The Lessons is driven by the poet’s passion for natural
history, for the marvels and horrors of science,
for the people closest to her, and, in every way,
by music. The risks Diaz takes in this beautiful
first book are the profound risks of art and of love."
 
-Gail Mazur


"Excitedly descriptive, sinuously rhythmical,
and vividly perceptive, Joanne Diaz's poems
'wring the roots of thought' and fill the mind's eye
with scenes of the paradoxically sensuous richness
of longing--homesickness, sorrow, love.  In this
book, "desire" is not just an erotic longing but an
existential one; that is, it is our capacity and hunger
for meaning."

-Reginald Gibbons


"In this first collection of poems by Joanne Diaz, the world of made things (violins, domesticated dogs, children, syringes) ache and echo back to the wild and troubled sources from whence they came. And between the source and the made thing lies a pattern (and a fine musical friction among the words) that Diaz has arranged with a deft hand.  These poems are fraught with mortality. Her knowledge that
'everyone must die a little' is subtly both terrible and beautiful."

-John Poch