Long Island Poet Shares Nearly 80 Years of Loves and Losses

NEW YORK, Oct. 12, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Finishing Line Press on Monday announced the publication of Mommy and other Poems, the fourth poetry book by Long Island poet Joan Carole Hand, a poignant, imagistic exploration of Hand's life of loves and losses.

"In this impressive new collection, Joan Carole Hand offers her reader a deeply realized and convincing inventory of family and relationship, rooted in the rich soil of the poet's own life and aspirations," said George Wallace, past poet laureate of Suffolk County, N.Y, and former writer-in-residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace. "There is a truth in these poems – at once unapproachable, mesmerizing, inescapable – to which we are all ultimately subject."

Joan Carole Hand was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. in 1943. She migrated east on Long Island, settling in Rocky Point, N.Y. in 1969. She's a retired English instructor, who taught part-time at Stony Brook University, Empire College, C.W. Post, New York Institute of Technology, SUNY Suffolk, Penn State and the University of Iowa and the former Southampton College.

Trained as a fiction writer, Hand found her poetic voice with three previous chapbooks – Entrances to Nowhere (Cross-Cultural Communications, 1977), The Facts of Life (Cross-Cultural Communications, 1987) and East of July (Cross-Cultural Communications, 2004).

She holds an A.B. in English from Bard College (Class of '65), where the legendary Robert Kelly oversaw her thesis, an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars (Class of '66) and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshops (Class of '68). She is a mother of three, a grandmother of three and a cat mother of one.

"J.C. Hand's poetry has the requisite voltage, the electrical gists and piths that keep my eye and mind moving with her voice down the page in jolts of strobe light," said William Heyen, Ph.D., former poet-in-residence and professor of English emeritus at SUNY Brockport. "By way of both her interfused themes and the intensity of her saying, J.C. Hand is a sometimes shocking, often consoling, but always memorable poet. Emily Dickinson and Anne Sexton welcome her into their sisterhood."

MEDIA

Daniel Axelrod, Shea Communications, [email protected], 646-599-9998

SOURCE Finishing Line Press