Orange Tulips, reviewed in Pedestal Magazine by Jeanne Julian

The cover illustration of Joan Barasovska’s Orange Tulips, her third book, is an up-close portrait, a black-and-white photograph of a young woman. The subject’s expression is dreamy; there’s a Mona Lisa smile on her lips. But locks of dark hair hide half of the face, and the eyes are closed, shutting out the world. A note identifies that arresting cover image as the author at age sixteen. Thus, from the start, Barasovska invites us to understand that this is personal: a memoir in poems. The picture is a fitting introduction to a collection that exposes a deep, often painful, personal narrative and yet also keeps hidden the mysteries of the psyche.

Orange Tulips explores family, growing up, and a descent into clinical depression that results in alienation and institutionalization. As in the cover illustration, the narrator wears no mask, adopts no persona. The book is dedicated to Barasovska’s parents, the Freemans. The poet uses her mother’s name, “Elsie,” in “The Penn Fruit.” In “5905 Belmar Terrace,” the grandchild is “Joanele,” the author’s name with an affectionate Yiddish diminutive. In “Thief,” a doctor asks of the suicidal narrator, “Why did you do this, Joan?” Such biographical details are indicative of an unvarnished honesty. This is craft in the service of truth, truth in the mode of confessional poets such as Sylvia Plath or Randall Jarrell, who speaks of identifying with those who “have in common hopes without hope.”

But what is distinctive about Orange Tulips is that we don’t just land in the midst of despair. Barasovska takes us from light into dark, ushering us first through a childhood brightened with comforts, pleasures, and sympathies. Then, the poems addressing adolescence are shadowed by more than the usual conflicts and heartaches of young adulthood.

In the book’s opening section, “Too Young,” we meet a baby who is “much-wanted,” “moon-perfect” (“Lullaby”). The child grows up in a paradise of Yiddish songs, dance recitals, the “bond” with a beloved brother, the enchantment of daddy’s workplace. A bygone time and place are beautifully evoked in “Freeman’s Suits Coats and Dresses”:

Racks of dresses hang, flowery polished
cotton frocks in spring, coats with wide
collars and shoulder pads, shirtwaist
dresses, gowns in glittery colors, pastel
Easter suits and tweed suits with flaring
peplums. I know the words, I whisper
them and stroke the fabrics.

“The Penn Fruit” is equally cinematic in its details:

… Stewed tomatoes, mandarin
oranges delicate as doll-food, Campbell’s soup,
sardines, Gulden’s mustard, peanut butter,
Tide detergent in a box, blue Scott toilet paper,
Clorox bleach. I’m watching, I’m listening.
This is serious, this is women’s business.

But this girl notices more than the building blocks of domesticity. Barasovska is adept at subtly telling a larger story while writing from a child’s point of view: “The Penn Fruit” continues, “While we wait there’s a neighbor lady / my mother is polite to. I can tell they don’t like / each other much. My mother should be nicer.”

Perhaps this observation is a first glimpse of trouble in paradise. What little girl would not side with her mother? Other glimpses come when we see this apparently happy child feigning illness as an escape. She pretends she’s “Choking” during swim class to be “safe / from the strangling symmetry of this place.” In “Sore Throat,” the child thinks “sickness / is what I crave most of all,” “I want the gentleness that only sickness gets you.” The poem’s last line becomes a portent: “I need what I can’t name.” Even more chilling is a nightmarish scenario that seeps into the girl’s consciousness in “1963,” when as a “merry Girl Scout” on a field trip, she is overcome by a vision of “a fall” – a jump? – into a “gray river.” She names this compulsion “The sick,” linking it to her earlier craving for illness as an escape from the world. Here is the first of the “deep troughs” (“Girl on a Bus”) that will consume her spirit.

The book’s second section, “All Wrong,” chronicles the overwhelming emptiness of clinical depression, a state unappeased by love, by spring, by “bewildered” parents, or by therapy. The poet’s allusions to the lure of self-destruction are unsettlingly dispassionate. In “A Dark Door Opens,” the young woman is drawn to “floor to ceiling windows,” echoing her earlier vision of tumbling from a height. “Waking at Noon,” with the drumbeat of two-word lines, is a wonderfully taut metaphor for a psychic crisis. In the poem “All Wrong,” we’re moved by the yearning in “I only want to be / as useful as a sidewalk.” At first the simile seems whimsical. But then, we think of the actual uses of a sidewalk: something that people walk all over; something that disastrously breaks a fall.

On her twenty-first birthday, this troubled woman signs herself into an adult locked ward. The harrowing experiences there inform the subsequent poems, which are not for the faint of heart. With grim determination, Barasovska portrays the hopelessness and violence of everyday life in what she calls “my hospital.” The voice here is almost flat, as if numbed by meds, amid chaos and emotion. “I follow all the steps methodically,” the patient says when escaping the ward in an attempt to end her life. The blunt endings of these poems are particularly sobering. “I was neither dead nor safe” concludes “It Kept Happening.” In Caesura, “I have died, but not enough” evokes Plath’s “Lady Lazarus.” In “This One Day,” Barasovska’s leitmotif of drowning in “gray waters” recalls the choking and the gray river of childhood.

But the collection concludes with reaffirmation, a turning again toward life, however inexplicably. Here, water becomes not an element to drown in, but rather the sacrament that will revive a bouquet of drooping tulips. Moreover, the daughter seems to be released from her own obsession with mortality even as she experiences the rite of passage that comes with the death of parents. From the grave, the father and the mother each have their say in a poem. The final piece in the book, “Summer’s Start,” signifies a sea change: “I love this world I yearned to shed.” With that, we readers are left stunned and fulfilled by the descent and transcendence that Orange Tulips offers us.

Birthing Age, reviewed in Main Street Rag Journal by Maria Rouphail

Birthing Age is the debut collection of North Carolina writer Joan Barasovska. Published by Finishing Line Press, it is the newest in a body of poetry by women born in the mid-century US that thematizes the experiences of having been daughters, wives, and mothers during a period when women’s roles and expectations for their achievement and success were rapidly changing. Reflecting on their lives from the vantage point of mid-life and maturity, these poets are generating what can be rightly called wisdom literature. Birthing Age is such a work.

Consisting of thirty poems arranged into four sections, Birthing Age opens with formative memories. “Flight” and “My Father Teaches Me to Dive” capture the untrammeled joy of a child’s burgeoning self-mastery. “Flight” succeeds in suggesting the first promises of freedom and adventure epitomized in an exuberant bicycle ride through the neighborhood “high into the night / into the yellow buzzing light clear up to the fat orange moon[.]” Barasovska’s long lines and omission of punctuation recreate the feeling of headlong speed. In the second poem, the speaker relishes the “the perfect swan of me,” as she dives into the water, navigates its depths, and breaches the surface again with balletic precision.

With “The Day I Walked on Fire, ”Barasovska moves into a suite of incandescent lyrics about emerging into young womanhood. This poem is remarkable for the apophatic mystery expressed in three stunning quatrains. The first stanza begins by negating the title: “it wasn’t fire / it was ginkgo leaves” which the sun has transmuted into “juicy” heat.  At the moment when the numinous has erupted into ordinary time and space, the speaker discovers that she is a being with a destiny. In body and spirit, she is a site of the sacred, a “holy woman.”  On the other hand, “Neat Trick” captures the adult woman’s experience of objectification, of being reduced by men to being merely a body “all wrong / walking the world / like a flayed thing.”

Barasovska devotes a number of poems to adult scenes of childrearing, marriage, and divorce. After the children and the spouse have departed the domestic space (so integral to her self-understanding), life on her own brings new bouts of self-interrogation. Yet here, too, are discovery and mastery. “The narrow years are over,” the speaker says in “Home”: “I walk from room to room. / I ring the doorbell / and I’m the one who’s home.” There is also grace and gratitude in performing the obsequies for the dead, in washing the body of a mother whose hands lie “cupped in the form of a woman who shelters birds.”

Birthing Age celebrates “the late making of a self / […] / this hard way (“Lucky”). It affirms that aging “is not painless / there are scars” (“Birthing Age”). But there is triumph in the work to “birth this woman / bear forth / her good news.

Orange Tulips, reviewed in Main Street Rag Journal by Richard Allen Taylor

 As most writers of narrative poems or prose know, or should know, placing your protagonist in dangerous situations where the stakes are high helps to engage and hold the reader’s attention. In Joan Barasovska’s latest poetry collection, Orange Tulips, the stakes are very high—life or death—and the protagonist in this book is the author herself.

Having spent over thirty-five years in private practice, providing therapy to children with academic and psychological challenges, Barasovska would be expected to have extensive practical knowledge of issues such as depression, anxiety, and thoughts of suicide. And she does. But as she reveals in this book, her knowledge of these conditions began, not with her formal training, but with her own experiences as a troubled child and young adult.

The poem “1963” documents her early involvement with suicidal thoughts. (Several poems later in the book deal with actual suicide attempts.) The setting for the poem is a bridge across the Schuykill River. The author, then a Girl Scout, is crossing with her troop and the scout leader:

You can sit on the ledge if you’re brave.

You can stand on the ledge if you’re foolish…

What I care about, in one breath, is the impact of a fall…

Starting today, I’m the authority on jumping.

Much later, in the poem “All Wrong,” the author is 20. She lacks all sense of self-esteem. She repeats to herself criticism she has suffered and amplifies it.

Just look at me!

A shanda, disgrace,

such a smart girl,

dropout, breakdown,

breakup, crackup…

In one particularly memorable poem, “I’ve Never Told It Before,” the author tells of living in a mental hospital where many of the patients, including her, not only expressed suicidal thoughts but occasionally acted on those thoughts. In one case she befriended a girl named Lauren.

One day Lauren told me, in agony, It’s like there’s

Cotton stuffed in my head. I can’t stand it anymore!

I couldn’t stand my head either. I shared my plan.

Unscrew the lightbulb from the lamp by your bed…

Wrap it in a towel, smash it. Use a piece to cut yourself.

That night she did it, at least I think she died,

I don’t remember if they told us…

…Housekeeping came with buckets and mops

and none of us wanted to talk.

In the last third of the book, the poems reflect the author’s victory over the mental health challenges of her youth. She never uses the word “cured,” but in the poem “This One Day” she asks, Which morning did I wake safe from myself?...In years to come I would choke in grey waters, but I’d never sway on that ledge again.

In trying to sort out my reactions to these poems, the most persistent is a feeling of gratitude that, after many years of living with little or no empathy for persons—even friends and family—suffering from mental illness, Barasovska’s poems have bumped my empathy and understanding up a notch. I suspect that this book will do that for almost everyone who reads it. Another reaction is that everything in these poems is true. The poems are well-crafted and no words are wasted. The language is straightforward and is to be taken at face value. The literal truth is quite adequate for the kind of story told in these poems.

Joan Barasovska lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and is the author of two previous poetry collections, including Carrying Clare, published by Main Street Rag in 2022.

Orange Tulips, reviewed in Big City Lit by Victoria Reynolds

In Orange Tulips, Joan Barasovska explores the perilous territory where, as a young woman, she was “neither dead nor safe” (57). We follow her out onto the ledges and lethal precipices of her own mind, then into a locked psychiatric ward, where, as a young woman, she battles a “death sentence [that] glares from both sides” of her family tree (43).

The ailanthus tree

in the back alley

crowds the window

of another building

where I hope to die… (60)

Barasovska is a poet of intimate, feminine spaces. Her two previous chapbooks, Birthing Age (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Carrying Clare (Main Street Rag, 2022) crack open the often-private chambers of body, mothering, and parenting. They invite us to enter this difficult terrain and to consider feminine work anew.

The richly narrative poems in Orange Tulips invite us even deeper behind closed doors. The poems give us a glimpse of an imaginative young woman, alert to the powers of observation, and dedicated to finding words to match the nameless pain that overtakes her.

Barasovska explores memories of her Jewish girlhood in 1950’s Philadelphia. In her poem, “The Penn Fruit,” she and her mother shop for “Kaiser rolls, Grossinger’s seeded rye…/an icy jar of Vita pickled herring” (16). We meet her beloved father, the dress shop owner in “Freeman’s Suits Coats and Dresses,” and her aggrieved mother, an exacting survivor, whose unmistakable voice in the poem “Elsie Has Her Say,” resurrects the intergenerational inheritance of hard-won survivorship for both mother and daughter: “Joanie never guessed it was me who found my father/on the kitchen floor, gas hissing, oven door open” (72). We understand that the child, Joanie, has been schooled to become the poet of others’ pain.

So, even as a young woman locked in her own despair and locked away for her own safety, Barasovska still finds herself listening for the “accidental poetry/of overheard hallucinations” (48). In the altered world of inpatient life, take a taste of her “popcorn soaked in Thorazine/lithium-laced cotton candy” and you’ll feel the necessity of imagination and language to her survival (44).

These are brave poems, unflinching in their examination of a period near self-destruction in the poet’s life. These are also poems that relish “the ecstatic lift/of strength and artifice,” that poetry-making contributes to the difficult work of becoming who we are (19).

There is much pleasure in lingering over Barasovska’s careful crafting of each poem in this collection, but I recommend leaping into the experience of reading Orange Tulips as a unified book, front-to-back. A triumphant Barasovska emerges in these pages, enjoining us to “Admire me in my bikini on the high dive/ blindfolded and in love at the same time” (63).

And admire her we do—not just for trusting us with her pain, but for being so in love with poetry that she saved her own life.

North Carolina Literary Review

(See link: JS Absher’s review of Orange Tulips is on pages 81-84)