Crossing the Great Divide

Author of the recent and critically acclaimed memoir,I Hear Voices,Jean Feraca is also an award-winning poet. Her second collection of poems,Crossing the Great Divide,has not been widely available until now but forms a fascinating counterpoint to the story of emergence she reveals in her memoir. Brilliant, passionate, sexual, these poems travel into mythic ancestral landscapes in southern Italy and Sicily, on a psychic journey of self-discovery, sometimes luminous, sometimes harrowing, leading ultimately to deliverance, as in the title poem of the collection: "I shall live out my life rejoicing ribboning under the jagged shadow of the hawk. There is no reason for this joy eagle-bald, knifing through me like a canyon. There is nothing in this landscape that defines me." (copyright Jean Feraca. All rights reserved.)

Jean Feraca is the author of three collections of poetry and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Award, an Academy of American Poets Award, a Discovery Award from The Nation, and two Hopwood Awards. Her newest book is I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death, and the Radio. A resident of Madison, Wisconsin, she is the Distinguished Senior Producer with Wisconsin Public Radio, where she is host and executive producer of Here on Earth: Radio without Borders.