CMW Community

Finishing Line Press has released the chapbook Driving in the Fog, the second book of poetry by Joanne Lehman.

This engaging poetry collection embraces ambiguity and poses more questions than answers.

Though many of the poems are set in rural northeastern Ohio, Lehman doesn't limit herself to that landscape; she also includes personal narratives and imaginative retellings of biblical stories.

“ …Lehman’s linguistic tones deepen like winter seeds in the fields of central Ohio. . ; the speaker of these poems travels through wintry landscapes, and interrogates, like Job, the nature of suffering, the fruits of aging, separation, and loss . . Though these poems pose more questions than they embody inspired answers, we can trust this speaker, like a pilgrim through life’s vale, to “know the way and trust the road” because she has “traveled long with solitude.”
-Carolyne Wright, Blue Lynx Prize, American Book Award, Pushcart Prize

“Beneath Northeast Ohio—the unmistakable home ground of these poems by Joanne Lehman—a network of subterranean rivers, once-mighty channels buried by centuries of glacial to and fro, continues to course. Those attuned will hear the mark of those slow, ancient rhythms keeping time here, even if by keeping we mean keeping at bay. In sorrow or exuberance, in houses and in fields, the poems bear in the substrata of their lines the steady thrum of a permanence which, like that water, is a promise beyond belief.”
-John Estes, author of Kingdom Come