Judith Janoo's New Collection of Poems, JUST THIS — and the Resonance of Place (Book Recommendation)

As of 2022, Vermont (said the US government) had 130 people earning an income as writers. This figure looks ridiculously low to anyone who's been to an author event or book festival here ... but I suppose it's because of the income aspect. Vermont mystery writer Archer Mayor used to claim the average writer's income was $7,000 per year, which won't pay for the rent these days, let alone food and car. So most of Vermont's writers probably combine another paid gig with their writing. 

Cover art by Helen Stork.

Still, it's a small state and in a given region, you get to at least know each other's names and often faces. And that's about all I've known of Judith Janoo, after crossing paths with her at maybe a dozen writing-related events but never even having tea together. Plus I read and reviewed her 2019 collection of poems, After Effects, and recently saw and enjoyed one of her new poems in a literary magazine.

So I bought a copy of her newest book, JUST THIS (so new it's not yet on her website), and settled down to enjoy. And investigate.

Because yes, for me, a book of poems is a double-direction investigation -- looking at how someone else sees the world, and comparing it with my own experience, and learning from the gaps and overlaps. Before I'd finished reading the "front matter," I'd discovered things I hadn't wondered about ... including pointers that showed me that Judith's last name came from her late husband Vincent, born in Malaysia. Why hadn't I wondered about the name "Janoo" before? Maybe it just seemed to fit so well with Judith? 

The front matter also says she absorbed Malaysian culture for 27 years. Hungry for more about a culture I don't know, and how a "Maine-er" like Judith would connect with it, I began looking at PLACE in Judith's poems.

The first two are instantly located "here-abouts": one poem build in stubby and intriguing tercets, called "Route 132" (I know where that is, in real life!), and the next, "Bear Cub," also in tercets but with slightly longer lines and a rich trove of sensations, from touch to scent to bright color and hunger, and a deep tenderness. I'm home, I thought -- these are poems of "my place" in Vermont.

Then with a flip of the page I arrived in Maine, tasting the salt air and savor of my own mother's longed-for location, listening to the poet's childhood and new adulthood forming. "I am from the rocks and shore / of fishermen, lobster boats // dove gray mornings that rise / from blackness over water."

Abruptly, at the end of the first section of poems, I tumbled around the world to "Johor Bahru" on the South China Sea, and needed to press onward into the next section, that reader part of my mind whispering, "Tell me more! More!"

And so it went, through the collection. I might have asked for a sequence of poems that felt more geographically organized, but that, I know, is because I like organization. Instead, JUST THIS offered me five senses and a daring freedom of the map. 

I enjoyed it. I didn't put it down until the end, and then a few hours later I picked it up again and dipped back for more tastes. Let me know if you feel the same way about this resonant new collection.