Available via Silverfish Review Press.

ISBN: 978-1-878851-25-3

Cover art: Rosie Rudavsky

The specific beauties of the poems in Judy Katz’s How News Travels have to do with their accounts of actual human living—among family, among friends, in the real world, with its griefs and losses and growth, its immersions in time, hour by hour, day by day, its immersions in consciousness. The other beauty here, the perpetual beauty, is the illumination—the afterglow, the underglow, the aurora—with which the poet cradles and surrounds her world. A clarifying, eloquent distillation of the truth of our experience, and a wonderful book. 

— Vijay Seshadri 

By exploring presence and absence and presence in absence, Judy Katz creates quietly revelatory elegies and odes for the shifting relationships of mid-life: the death of a mother, the independence of grown children, the intimacy of romance and trust between husband and wife. These poems feel both inevitable and surprising, as they invite us into the passage of time. “There is a trail I can follow–– / each of us leaves it, / our light impress…” she writes, and we are transformed by her attention to detail, fresh imagery, and wonder. This is a collection to savor, for “who can sleep / when it keeps arriving / over and over / the world, the world.”

— Ellen Bass

Judy Katz is a brilliant poet. Her work is luminous and transparent as a mountain lake, and under the surface—the complexities: Katz is a storyteller who examines how we use stories to smuggle ourselves into the future, how the images we forge of each other conceal us—"sometimes the wide open space of you gone/is all it takes to let the whole world in."  These poems are hauntingly spiritual, but it's not a performative spirituality that finds answers in peak experience: it's the intuition that breathtaking questions are braided into the weaving and unweaving of our lives. The voice is so alive, often so playful—and again and again, you will find yourself in a dialogue with the unknowable. Poems like "The Last Five Minutes" are dazzling.  How News Travels is a stunning book. 

— D. Nurkse