How News Travels: POEMS

This is a debut collection of poetry read by the author.


The specific beauties of the poems in Judy Katz’s How News Travels have to do with their accounts of actual human living—among family, among friends, in the real world, with its griefs and losses and growth, its immersions in time, hour by hour, day by day, its immersions in consciousness. The other beauty here, the perpetual beauty, is the illumination—the afterglow, the underglow, the aurora—with which the poet cradles and surrounds her world. A clarifying, eloquent distillation of the truth of our experience, and a wonderful book. 

— Vijay Seshadri 


By exploring presence and absence and presence in absence, Judy Katz creates quietly revelatory elegies and odes for the shifting relationships of mid-life: the death of a mother, the independence of grown children, the intimacy of romance and trust between husband and wife. These poems feel both inevitable and surprising, as they invite us into the passage of time. “There is a trail I can follow–– / each of us leaves it, / our light impress…” she writes, and we are transformed by her attention to detail, fresh imagery, and wonder. This is a collection to savor, for “who can sleep / when it keeps arriving / over and over / the world, the world.”

— Ellen Bass


The voice is so alive, often so playful—and again and again, you will find yourself in a dialogue with the unknowable....How News Travels is a stunning book. 

— D. Nurkse



For more information about Judy Katz's poetry or How News Travels, please visit https://www.judykatzpoetry.com/