BOOKS

Julie Maloney’s “Private Landscape” uses poetic form to give her heart permission to speak. This slim book, written without censoring, unveils the many layers of a woman. Divided into two sections, the first section titled “Home,” takes the reader through cancer. Observations rally around the intimate. In the second section, Maloney continues to weave a human mosaic, never hesitating to take us deeper. This is a book about love and loving as told from a strikingly honest point of view. Its themes will resonate with every woman and those brave enough will pass it on to the men in their lives.

      “Julie Maloney’s poems in her collection Private Landscape move with the exquisite grace of her abilities as a dancer and choreographer. Dream narratives sing in delicate imagery. Pain of cancer is here, honestly revealed and transcended; love is here, in its greatest giving. There is not a trace of easy sentimentality. This is a collection to remember, at once personal and universal.”

--Charlotte Mandel

Poet, Sight Lines; Editor, Saturday Press
Poet/Lecturer, Barnard College Center for Research and Women


      “Julie Maloney’s Private Landscape gives us a microscope to see and feel moments that might otherwise escape our notice, moments both tender and defiant. For much of the poetry collection, Maloney tells us that “cancer has whipped my face like wet wind.” But what the poet does with the wet wind of cancer is nothing short of remarkable. In her rigorously artistic life, cancer is transformed into an elixir that draws out soulful knowing and elemental experiences

       I could read two of these poems until my eyes fail to see. Maloney takes up to the very core of love in He Loves Me the Way He Knows Best. She holds our face up to the most intimate moments of a husband caring for a woman, post surgery and chemo-filled...“never mentioning my bald head and round belly.” In Memorial Sloan-Kettering, I rejoice with the poet’s victory of finding the rooftop where “new friends on the roof wear hospital gowns. Their buttocks swing like the backside of Guernsey cows.”

--Jacqueline Sheehan

Novelist, Truth and Lost and Found
Editor, Women Writing in Prison

© 2004 Mango Press, LLC
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