Ceremonial Entries by Joseph DeRoche

Edited by Kevin Gallagher and Martha Collins

Joseph DeRoche was a beloved professor of creative writing and literature at Northeastern University for many years. Ceremonial Entries, just published by Cervena Barva Press, brings together most of his poems, many of them not published in book form before.

With razor-sharp wit and élan, Joseph DeRoche’s poems remind us that revelation is never easy—that it often comes at great cost as we ‘float to Paradise / In a slaughter / Of small things.’ DeRoche’s poems are as formally taut as they are conversationally playful. His impeccable, architectural eye for detail creates a language that unmakes and reshapes the coercive structures that constrict our speech. In poems that delightfully blur the boundary between body and spirit, the individual human utterance becomes ‘an ordering / Against the furious weather / Of the world’s silence.’”   —Tony Trigilio