Judith Partelow

"Judith Partelow’s book of poetry, Passion and Provocation, is a collection of poetry that continues to resonate long after you’ve finished reading the poems. Her poems are filled with evocative experiences shared by so many of us: love, ordinary touchstones, loss, resilience, and strength. She has crafted the words we might have said of our shared experiences. To be able to connect with each reader on an emotional level is a gift. Judith brings us a celebration of spirit revealing the complex and simple moments of life with grace, vulnerability, and wit."

“It is rare indeed that I find a poetry collection so relevant to life with emotions that are captured with such passion and clarity. This is a treasury of life experiences. Here are poems for the people, written from the heart, reflections of deep sorrow and joy engraved in one’s soul. As one reads through this, it recalls pivotal times in one’s own experience. It covers the spectrum of a lifetime – from the beginnings, through first love, motherhood, family, loss, longings, the spark of renewed love; through the fear and vulnerability of losing oneself to another, rebuilding love and recognizing spiritual bonds. These vignettes, a distillation of passion and pain, trigger one’s own experiences from the well of the subconscious. Judith Partelow speaks from the heart and shines a light into the soul. She captures the fragility of life. She conveys complex emotional experiences with clarity and makes poetry accessible even to the uninitiated. This collection is truly a treasure."

Judith Partelow’s poetry collection, Passion & Provocation, is a must-read for any woman who has lived and loved. Her voice will sound as familiar as your own with its yearnings, triumphs, regrets and humor, a voice that speaks from the “inside out” about a woman’s life today.

Judith Partelow’s latest book, Passion and Provocation, is a rich compilation of poems about the many phases of womanhood from first longings to marriage, to old age. She uses musical language that sings her emotions: “Tropical ma-an/pulsates to a calypso beat/with tropical wo-man/in syncopated rhythm.” In a tender moment, the author ponders the life of a mother: “Moistened fingers clinging to our hair/play a fiddle tune/an endless tune/we dance to all our lives.” She chronicles past relationships, old loves and new, while drawing the reader in with sensual images that celebrate her children and her own younger self. The poems at the end of her book, wise and sometimes heartbreaking, depict places such as Mariupol “under smoke and flaming skies” or oncology waiting rooms. These are poems to savor for their astonishing beauty and contemplative vision.

"...they (Judith Partelow's poems) are very powerful and enormously intimate in that strange way when something the author feels is also felt by the reader. I felt a punch to the gut a couple of times when I had a wince of recognition - 'this very thing has happened to me!' I find in these poems a lot of strength but also a lot of vulnerability, with flashes of humor and moments of compassion"

“With this collection of selected poems, Partelow has taken the threads of woman’s existence and woven them into a vivid tapestry of a life richly lived, poetry that is poignant and passionate, revealing and brave."

One of the things I love about poetry books is that they don’t have to be read sequentially, but this collection is worth reading from front to back, as themes emerge on their own as well as connections between poems, small links that weave a context to the whole.

…there’s a definite flow to this collection. Not just through Partelow’s themes—domesticity, love, loss, memory, and on to places and spirituality—but through her voice itself, which is warm and personal through all the various stories these poems tell.

Passion and Provocation is indeed both: the poet’s expression of her passion, her life stages and events, the spaces she’s filled with people and memories… and in the process provoking in readers echoing recollections and connections. It’s a compilation that will resonate in minds and hearts after the poems themselves have been long since read, a celebratory, intimate study of one life and all the lives that have touched it.

Dear Judith,
I've been reading your poetry and enjoying your thoughtful observations of life's many challenges, blessings, losses and gifts, everything from losing a love, and mourning a poor squirrel, to reflecting on how a much traveled suitcase, while replaced by newer models, still reminds one of old memories. Your poems reflect so many intimate details of living, loving and losing and retrieving, yearning for that infinite something and giving one's all.

Passion & Provocation: Selected and New Poems is a series of writings that embrace personal experience and women’s issues, injecting poems into chapters that move from domestic themes to romance, realization, growth, and spiritual reflection. With such a structure in mind, the progressive nature of Judith Partelow’s life journey gives readers a thoroughly engrossing journey that opens with a bang of insight in “I Used to Write”: I used to write when the lump in my throat hurt so much it splattered ink all over paper. I haven’t written for a long time but suddenly life seems summed up and my throat aches it aches. From this, a steady pace and progression follows Partelow through life and growth opportunities, the free verse delivering a one/two punch of female experience. One example of this power and female-centric observations and relationships resides in “Asylum,” where: I move around inside your discarded housedress, dear ancient lady, reviving its tattered threads with a strong heart and sinuous limbs. We are linked now – I to your ninety-five years as you attempt to wrench free – you, to my separation of another sort. The challenge of this collection, to some sensitive readers, may lie in the heart-wrenching aspects of many of Partelow’s observations and connections. These capture the emotional quandaries of family ties, aging, and philosophical and emotional realizations which emerge from as ordinary a life pursuit as in “Recycling”: My husband finds questionable left-overs in the fridge but has learned to ask before tossing – I’ve cautioned him it may still have some use. I do not hoard but I do hesitate before disposal. Could it have another life? I certainly have. Librarians who choose Passion & Provocation: Selected and New Poems for their collections will want to especially highly recommend it to women’s groups and women’s literature readers, who will find the collection as a whole a powerful, immersive experience. Filled with insights evolving from the ordinary, Passion & Provocation: Selected and New Poems is best digested slowly, for maximum flavor and reflection. Every bite is worth the time spent on contemplation, rewarding readers of free verse poetry with many rich insights.