In poem after poem, Old Stranger unearths moments that shape a woman’s life. The poet’s eye is unflinching as she sees the past folded into the present. Her body is the ground of deep soul hunger. Her language is music.
“There are few poets in America who can combine Joan Larkin's formal mastery with her emotional intensity.”
In Blue Hanuman, the poet's voice becomes the thing it speaks about, connecting the body to art and to the whole process of nature—the world's body seen from the inside.
“[Joan Larkin's] poems are direct, brief, and quietly shattering and almost always double-sided: one things sets off another thing; memory itself expands into a kind of volatile expression of what it means to be alive in the present moment. In her simple—even, at times, ambiguous language — she is always tracking an abiding consciousness that is as critical as it is loving.”
—Michael Klein, author of The Early Minutes of Without: New & Selected Poems
My Body: New and Selected Poems, winner of The Publishing Triangle’s 2008 Audre Lorde Award, is Joan’s first book since the 1997 Lambda Award-winning Cold River.My Body includes substantial selections from previous books and more than 40 new poems.
“Over the decades of writing, Joan Larkin has proved her mastery, whether the poem is mythic, elegiac, or biographical. Her honesty is overwhelming, but it is coupled with poetic cunning, gorgeous language and a rhythm and tone so precise and appropriate that it is—as in the great poets—transparent. There are no tricks and no evasive moves, nothing that in ten years she will be ashamed of or confused by. She is a poet of compassion and pity. Where it is appropriate, she is merciless, especially to herself. I love reading her poems; I love reading them over and over. I salute her.”
—Gerald Stern, author of Blessed as We Were: Late Selected and New Poems, 2000-2018
Painted Leaf Press 1997 University of Wisconsin Press, 2003 ISBN 978-0-299-18704-0
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Translated by Joan Larkin and Jaime Manrique
From the publisher: “These exquisite love poems, some of them clearly addressed to women, were written by the visionary and passionate genius of Mexican letters, the seventeenth-century nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. In this volume they are translated into the idiom of our own time by poets Joan Larkin and Jaime Manrique. Some of them are rooted in Renaissance courtly conventions; others are startlingly ahead of their time, seemingly modern in the naked power of the complex sexual feelings they address.”
Glad Day: Daily Meditations for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender People
Hazelden, 1998 ISBN 9781568381893
Addressing the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, Glad Day speaks to issues that touch everyone, regardless of sexual orientation: change, fear, self-disclosure, faith in a power greater than ourselves, success and failure, openness to ourselves and others.
A portrait of a year in recovery, written as daily conversations between sponsor and sponsee in twelve-step recovery. Exploring concerns and struggles involved every day in recovery, they model a relationship based on compassion, humor, and mutual trust.
A Woman Like That: Lesbian and Bisexual Writers Tell their Coming Out Stories
Avon/Bard Books 1999 Harper Paperbacks 2000 ISBN 9780380802470
This anthology collects portraits of desire and courage, creating a rich, diverse picture of the meaning and impact of “coming out.” Thoughtful, wise, and often hilarious, A Woman Like That includes strong writing by both famous and lesser-known writers, among them Pat Califia, Chrystos, Judy Grahn, Bertha Harris, Jill Johnston, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Elizabeth Lorde Rollins, and Tristan Taormino. It was nominated for both a Lambda Award and a Publishing Triangle Award for Nonfiction. Read Janet Mason’s review on BookDyke
Argos Books, 2012 ISBN 978-1-938247-01-9 Twenty-poem hand-sewn chapbook, designed by Mårten Wessel
". . . Poems rich in the strangeness and struggle of the natural world. . . From the eye of the plankton to the shell of the Red-Eared Slider, creatures—both human and animal—glow with the radiance of hard-won attention."
Edited by Joan Larkin and Carl Morse St. Martin’s Press, 1988 ISBN 0312022131
Gay and Lesbian Poetry In Our Time, winner of a Lambda Literary Award for Poetry, is the first of its kind, an anthology of poetry by both lesbians and gay men. It brings together the work of nearly 100 poets, from the famous to the hitherto unknown, a multigenerational group spanning a wide range of cultural heritages. Among the poets included are Frank Bidart, Chrystos, Cheryl Clarke, Edward Field, Allen Ginsberg, Judy Grahn, Essex Hemphill, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, and Tennessee Williams.
Winner of a Lambda Award for Poetry, Cold River includes harsh and tender elegies. These strong lyrics take on desire, loss, and the gifts of wholeness and self-knowledge in the age of AIDS.
“In Cold River, Joan Larkin's poems move deeper than ever into grief and tenderness and praise, her own wild and quiet voice the embodiment of desire.” —Jean Valentine
“The poems in this little book that face AIDS are certainly some of the bravest and most eloquent ones on the subject.” —Michael Klein
Cold River is out of print but some copies may be available from Amazon and other sellers of used books.
“With imagery as exquisite, unsparing, and precise as a scalpel, A Long Sound shocks us through an underworld of black-out and soul-death into the realm of spiritual and sensual freedom we, with the poet, can call recovery.” —Honor Moore
A Long Sound is out of print but some copies are available from Amazon and other sellers of used books.
Housework was Joan’s first published book of poetry. It includes Mimi Weisbord’s paintings of dollhouses, which hint of primal family dramas. Housework was typed on an IBM Selectric; the cover was created on an improvised light table using letters pressed-on by hand. It was printed at the Print Center in Brooklyn with the imprint Out & Out Books, a collective formed by Joan, Jan Clausen, Elly Bulkin, and Irena Klepfisz during the surge of feminist publishing in the 1970s.
“I love Joan Larkin’s poems, for their music, their tensile strength, their truthfulness, their clarity. . .” —Adrienne Rich, in Ms. Magazine
Housework is out of print, but some copies may be available from Amazon and other sellers of used books.
Edited by Joan Larkin and Elly Bulkin Persephone Press, 1981 ISBN 0930436083
This early lesbian feminist anthology collected strong work by a large number of lesbian poets, reflecting the rich diversity of age, race, class, and experience among poets identifying as lesbians. Among the poets included are Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa and Judy Grahn.
Lesbian Poetry is out of print, but some used and collectible copies are available from at alibris and Amazon.
One of the first anthologies of lesbian poetry, this groundbreaking book gathered a wide range of poetry and poets, some appearing for the first time in a lesbian literary context. Amazon Poetry is out of print but some copies may be available at alibris.
