Like photogravures, the images of Murmur & Crush etch memory and landscape into indelible emotional content. The road, once, the fields, now, a boy, an afternoon, wings, horses, orchards, and ladders appear and disappear, woven into reoccurring motifs, always unexpected and elemental. These poems implicate the world broadly but depict it intimately. They exist in the past and present at once. Here, Janson writes, “Truth’s got a murky taste.” As poet Carol Potter says of this collection, “The joy we find… is an earned joy; rapture ‘in spite of the demise of everything.’ “We’re all/ pilgrims,” Janson writes, “Sometimes we’re incandescent.”
Maya Janson’s poetry has appeared widely in journals including Harvard Review, Lyric, Alaska Quarterly Review, Jubilat, and Rattle, and has been included in Best American Poetry. She received her BA from Smith College, her MFA from Warren Wilson College, and has been a recipient of an artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She lives in Florence, MA and is employed as a community health nurse and a lecturer in poetry at Smith College.
