The poetry of Julie Joosten

I'd forgotten that first light is blue and how much I like it, how lucky I'd been all my life to see it once in a while when I couldn't sleep.

The poetry of Julie Joosten is like that, it makes me feel that I'm lucky to be in the world, much less to be alive. Not that I'm special, but that I have no beginning or end.

It's said that Walt Whitman was sort of a woman sometimes, with all the joy he expressed in the natural world; well Julie Joosten is sort of like Walt Whitman sometimes, but as a girl might be.

Her book of poems is called, Light Light. The poems move through the book one by one, though, as I said, there is really no beginning or end.

Somewhere in between the beginning and end of the book, however, are some lines that only Julie Joosten could have written. "The mereness of rain, it's simple happening" is one of them and "Walk silence out of the ground" is another, and "Night grows thunder in this light of strange increase" another, and "the aerial movement of geopolitical forces reflects the distance clouds cover," yet another.

Julie Joosten's poetry grows as a plant grows. There's always something growing in it. Things that grow begin in the dark and end in the light, and this can be said of the poetry of Julie Joosten.