NCWN

Night Huntress by Joanna Catherine Scott
ISBN 13: 978-1-59948-106-7
80 pages, $14

Joanna Catherine Scott's latest collection of poetry.  "In the Dawn Valley", the last poem of the book ,won the Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition

Stunning. One of the finest manuscripts I've ever read. Compelling from beginning to end, these prose poems-each alive in heart-pulsing language-tell a story of grief, madness, agony. How is it possible, the Night Huntress asks, that the pain born of a tragic loss can culminate into a peace that passes understanding? Read this collection, and you will know that you are in the hands of a masterful writer whose prose poems are so lyrically controlled you won't want to miss a single step, image, metaphor. Scott spins various points of view into a journey-a mystery of the heart so profound you will feel transported into myth and parable.

--Irene Blair Honeycutt, Waiting for the Trout to Speak

I wept over this book. Every one of us has known a young man or woman who has gone out and got drunk and killed themselves. In telling the story of one, Night Huntress speaks for all. And yet there is no preaching or hyperbole. The story is told simply, in language so controlled and elegant that a brutal misadventure becomes transformed into a thing of melancholic beauty. A shocking but at the same time a comforting and healing book.

—Tony Abbott

Scott succeeds in giving us not just an evening’s disaster, but the story of an entire family and the rings of joy and sorrow that surround it. Starting with what is, in fact, a compressed novel told in the heightened language of poetry, she expands outwards into a series of meditations on grief and healing, ending with the lovely benedictory "In the Dawn Valley," the title itself evoking a new beginning.

—Roy Jacobstein