Judith Terzi’s Now, Somehow perfectly captures the Proustian moment—a carefully calibrated record of the backwards look. In the very first poem, she imagines her oncologist cutting into her colon as a way to question what remains, what’s left behind in this rearrangement of organs: “No memory of all the little madeleines / and Sunday’s flow of hours. Slippery / fingertips straining to hold onto a waltz.” The focus on recovering the body also includes the Covid pandemic, as the final words of the book lament “putting on a little black dress to go nowhere” when what she really longs for is to “Put on yesterday’s refrains.” It is no accident that Terzi’s last word is “refrains,” the repeated lines of songs, for it is this impulse to sing again—to re-verse—that is at the heart of this astonishing collection.
–Linda Dove, author of Fearn, This Too, O Dear Deer, and In Defense of Objects
Now, somehow, in the times of Covid, aging, failing marriages, cancer, isolation, and always the memory of more innocent, hopeful times, in the midst of life, real life—we are going to put on our little black dress, favorite necktie, and we are going to go dancing. Now, Somehow, a chapbook of poetry by Judith Terzi—poems of skill, tough lyricism, humor, and solace, the solace of poems beautifully wrought.
–Richard Garcia, author of The Chair, The Other Odyssey, and The Persistence of Objects
Judith Terzi speaks in tongues and trusts her readers to look up a thing or two. She reminds us that frailty and the limits of medicine plop us down in the middle of life, even as they pluck us up from our lives. She knows that her days are under threat, and that no one else can tell her story. I give her especial props for using the repetitions of form to enact the accumulation of being overwhelmed that illness brings, and, in so doing, to go meta on us. She gives us a furnished world where every tchotchke has a story to tell, and where inner life and outer events hold conversations. Welcome to a full place.
–Karen Greenbaum-Maya, author of Kafka’s Cat and The Book of Knots and Their Untying
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