Crossing the Great Divide - Paperback

by Jean Feraca (Author), Robert Brustein (Foreword by)

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 rejoicingribboning under the jagged shadow of the hawk. There is no reason for this joyeagle-bald, knifing through me like a canyon. There is nothing in this landscape that defines me."
(copyright Jean Feraca. All rights reserved.)

Author Biography

Jean Feraca is the author of three collections of poetry and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Award, an Academy of American Poets Award, a Discovery Award from The Nation, and two Hopwood Awards. Her newest book is I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death, and the Radio. A resident of Madison, Wisconsin, she is the Distinguished Senior Producer with Wisconsin Public Radio, where she is host and executive producer of Here on Earth: Radio without Borders.