More About Chasing Justice:

Endorsements:

“It’s good to read poems that care about the world, that love the fish, the comet, the shoulder and its freckles, the body with its frailties. ‘Everything counts,’ this poet reminds us, and we are lucky to count the world’s blessings alongside her.”
—Danusha Laméris, author of Blade by Blade

“Chasing Justice is a wonderful creation of song and scar, of deep vulnerability and raw humanity, of emotional complexity and simple witness. In a world where empathy is under threat of erasure, Durham’s heartfelt, conceptual poetry delicately balances what is broken with our constant reaching for something beautiful. There’s such sharpness to Durham’s metaphors, such richness to the painfully stirring world she builds for us, both defining and pushing against the edges of our shared human experience.”
—John Sibley Williams, author of As One Fire Consumes Another

“Author Joanne Durham explains, ‘I want to tread gingerly / through everything / that falls   rots     weeps on this earth.’ In her important new collection, she crafts poems that ‘widen the aperture’ and examine both beauty and atrocity as we ‘[float] in space / on gravity’s whim / held whole by balance . . . ’ A cleared-eyed citizen of this ‘weathered’ earth, Durham ‘knows / there’s work ahead.’ Throughout this book, she joins justice to a hope that affirms the ‘moon and stars we still [believe] in.’”
—Marjorie Maddox, author of Small Earthly Space

“I like this lively, lyrical collection of poems very much, with its urgency of engagement and its very human narratives. The engagement is both cultural and personal. In a prefatory epigraph, Durham quotes E. B. White about the daily challenge of striving to both ‘save’ and ‘savor’ the world, and she accepts that challenge, in a voice that probes, quests, and praises, that laments, argues, and affirms. There’s a sureness of cause at the core of Chasing Justice. The collection’s call to action, finally, is addressed as much to the writer herself as to her readers: to ‘see (each other) in our own stained mirrors’ and ‘to rise above everything that tries to make us sink.’” 
—Derek Kannemeyer, author of Mutt Spirituals and Found Voices

“Connections in all their ‘fickle symbiosis’ are revealed and celebrated in Chasing Justice. Joanne Durham’s attentive, aching poems speak of salt, gravity, paper cranes, book bans, dust, doom scrolling, alchemy, and so much more—as if to answer the eighth-century Tamil poet Andal’s question, ‘What use is this howling tenderness?’”
—Laura Grace Weldon, author of Universe Marveled In a Jar

Sample Poems:

What the Salt Meant

“That night when the angels came to Lot [his wife was] going to all her neighbors and saying to them, give me salt, because we have guests…Therefore ‘she became a pillar of salt.’” —Bereshit Rabbah 51:5

Her sin, after all, was not
that her rheumy eyes traveled back,
swollen with hope that her daughters’
singed shadows might rise from the blaze
of collapsing skyline. It was that Lot’s wife
warned her neighbors. She would become

the woman who watched the whip burn
across another’s back, then spread
the word one dark night to slip
inside the barn, hide breathless
beneath the hay while the slave catchers
followed a false scent. The woman

who witnessed yellow stars
sewn on neighbors’ jackets,
and went to borrow a cup of sugar,
perhaps a bit of salt, whispering
what she had heard in town about
the coming cattle cars. The woman

who type government reports
no one imagined
she understood, then waited
near the factory gate at closing time,
la migra viene, don’t go
to work tomorrow. It wasn’t

what she chose to face
that raised the angel’s outrage,
fearing the flames would heat
her mind and melt
her heart. What the salt meant
to silence was her voice.

Don’t Give Children Any Gifts Tied to Reading
—in response to Florida’s HB1467, K-12 Education

Go then, pack away Honey I Love, unfit title
to eight-year-olds. Hide Can I Touch Your Hair?
braided with so much empathy it must be banned. Destroy
A Caribbean Dozen, the book Robert finds first thing
each morning, which sometimes gets him through the day
without stabbing a classmate with his pencil. “I practiced
the poem from Haiti,” he tells me. Remove Good Books,
Good Times (the editor was gay). Search Daryl before
he goes home, be sure there’s no Pocketful of Poems
he’s hidden to read with a flashlight under his covers. Snatch
Out of Wonder out of Eddie’s hands as he and Dora share
the rocking chair, puzzling over “chasing justice”
and “smile like moon.” She teaches him the hard words,
he shows her the funny part about alphabet soup—
choosing their favorite books, they give each other gifts
they must unlearn to give.