- Ms. Valente's book, Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul, is available for purchase from many book stores as well as from Loyola Press' on-line bookstore bookstore: http://www.loyolabooks.org/productdetail.asp?id=73973) or by calling 1-800-621-1008. The book is also available through Amazon.com.
"This intimate and moving collection makes it clear that poetry can matter." --Stephen Young, The Poetry Foundation
"This is a thoroughly engaging and illuminating book. Judith Valente and Charles Reynard show us how we, too, can enter a poem through the openings our own lives give us." -- Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After and Tender Mercies
"In the poems they have chosen as well as in their personal responses to them, Judith Valente and Charles Reynard offer more than enough to think about, and a great deal to be thankful for." -- Joseph Parisi, former editor of Poetry Magazine, from the Foreword of the book
- Ms. Valente's poetry chapbook, Inventing An Alphabet, can be ordered directly from the author at jvalente17@msn.com for $8.00 (shipping and handling included. This is what Mary Oliver, who selected Inventing An Alphabet as the co-winner of the 2004 Aldrich Poetry Prize, said of this collection of poems:
"The first thing I look for in a manuscript of poems is genuineness. Am I reading the pages of someone who truly but merely likes to write, or someone who is impelled to write, in the cadences of the poetic discipline? ... Judith Valente [has] for me this sense of the genuine... Ms. Valente has constructed an active and even frisky language, pulling into the poem references and allusions that tease our minds as they amplify the poem's subject and mood and landscape. We are engaged and unravel the poems therefore in a kind of rickrack stroll, enjoying the fulsome ride toward summation."
Discovering Moons, Ms. Valente's first full-length collection of poems (ISBN 9780979882586), may be ordered through amazon.com, barnes&noble.com, powells.com, AbeBooks.com or directly from the publisher, Virtual Artists Collective at vacpoetry.org.
This is what other poets are saying about Discovering Moons:
"Discovering Moons" offers a reader a variety of journeys that reveal how poetry can lead to an appreciation of both the spirituality in the quotidian and the worldliness of the spiritual. Sometimes the trips are a rollicking roller coaster ride full of surprising and delightful twists and turns. Others provide darker voyages that leave one nodding one's head in approval of the depth of the discoveries to which she brings one. A particularly admirable quality in some of Valente's poems is her ability to inject elements of humor in them to achieve a balanced, realistic mix of the comic and tragic." (Ron Offen, editor, "Free Lunch, A Poetry Miscellany")
"The moon in the title of Judith Valente's book, "Discovering Moons," becomes, after reading these deeply felt poems, the moon invisibly tethered to earth, as spirit and body are mysteriously tethered in Valente's work." (Stuart Dybek, author, "The Coast of Chicago" and "Streets In Their Own Ink")
To read more about "Discovering Moons," go to http://www. vacpoetry.org/discovering moons.htm.
To hear an interview with Judith Valente about "Discovering Moons" on Chicago Public Radio (July 31, 2009) go to http://www.wbez.org/Content.aspx?audioID=35835
- Ms. Valente and co-author Charles Reynard are available to read from and discuss their anthology at book stores or before groups. They can be contacted to make for such presentations. See "Contact" page.
- Ms. Valente regularly contributes freelance essays and poems to various print and electronic media. She can be contacted by e-mail or snail mail. See "Contact" page.
- She has presented keynote speeches and other presentations to media and community groups on various subjects, including journalism, literature and poetry, religion and ethics issues.
- Ms. Valente is a sought-after poetry reading and workshop presenter. She and her husband Charles Reynard have developed a variety of programs suitable for aspiring poets in a short or long workshop setting, for spiritual retreat programming, and classroom settings for elementary, high school, and college students involved in literature and poetry studies.
"Mother of God Monastery, Watertown South Dakota"
-- Judith Valente
They lined up the eggplant, like purple-robed princes on the linoleum floor, beside over-ripe
melons, the moist fists of tomatoes,
wailing horns of yellow squash, so the kitchen
resembled a house in transition -
people moving out, or in.
Sister Rose shivered in from the fields,
announced the season’s first frost,
an early one for September. Sister Frances
recalled the past night’s moon, slender
rind of silver, like the one that hung
in the Dakota sky the night her mother died,
and how she thought she’d heard an owl cooing,
wondered what soul it might be, that owl calling.
They were fresh from the Opus Dei: By the tender
mercy of our God, the dawn of salvation will rise
upon us guiding our feet in the ways of peace,
and now like bent flowers, they knelt before
kitchen gods. In the deserted chapel, a stone wall
spelled out its silent message:
Pray. Work. Listen.
--Judith Valente
To love you, I must love
the way Matisse
loved the simple egg: so much
he sketched one every morning
for years on end,
the charcoal pencil tensed
in his hand to trace
the curve just right, his eyes
lost in a hundred shades of white.
I must love also
this rust-dripped
elevated track, the dragon drone
of the silver train as it floats past
on its steel throne,
leaving a taste of rust and slate.
And I must love
the hand-warmth
of the coffee cup,
the veins of parched ivy
skulking up
the yellow house next door.
Love equally the quasars
heating our most
distant galaxies:
they roll through space
like a child’s slinky,
sing their billion-year-old melodies.
And I must love
the teetering barbershop
stuck in the middle of the block
in this sad white painting.
The shop slants on its side
like a version of the truth,
blond filaments of youth
powdering the checkered floor,
like your dark homuncular
shavings, mornings
in the white basin. To love
you, I must love a world of venial
sins and Sunday quiet, a blue
room with white borders,
a claw-foot tub, and you inside it.
