In this debut collection, Anna Journey invites the reader into her peculiar, noir universe nourished with sex and mortality. Her poems are haunted by demons, ghosts, and even the living who wander exotic landscapes that appear at once threatening and seductive. In these poems, her sly speaker renames a pink hibiscus on display at Lowe's, "Lucifer's Panties"; another character chants, "I'd fall devil / over heels over edge over oleander"; and one woman writes a letter to the underworld:

Dear black bayou, once, by a river

I bit a man's neck. His scent: the raw

teak air husked inside stomachs of six

Russian nesting dolls--the ones in the attic I pulled

apart and open. The ones I

pulled apart and open like Styrofoam cups.

In her third collection of poems, The Atheist Wore Goat Silk, Anna Journey once again celebrates the profusion of sensuality erupting from the material world. As she weaves dark fables, luminous family memories, and hard-edged personal tales into a singular fabric, Journey charts the boundaries of absence and departure, delineating the separations that we often hope to stitch back together at the intersections of the body and the imagination. Rhythmically charged and lyrically narrative, these poems are rich with verbal cascades and currents of mordant reflections. Throughout this collection, both readers and the poet are linked by a delicate and elegantly spun web of verse.

"Anna Journey's poetry is really magical." -- David Lynch, director of Blue Velvet and creator of Twin Peaks

"Anna Journey's second collection of poems is wonderful and brings something precise and wild out of a vivid night, an imagery that finds its own necessary music, like sudden isolated birdsongs at dawn. The multiplying shadows of the mind are made exterior here, surprisingly illustrated with anecdotal thought. And Dante no longer concludes that all lovers are martyrs. I'm so happy to have this work in my life." -- Norman Dubie, author of The Volcano

"Anna Journey, in her new book of poems, Vulgar Remedies, creates an alchemical self whose shimmering limbic/alembic lyrics distill the mysterious terrors of childhood, the dangerous passions of adults, into her own honey-dusk 'voodun': protective, purified to gold. Poetry is always a time machine: here we are invisible travelers to a bewitched past, a beautifully occluded future. These poems are erotic, vertiginous, revelatory, their dazzling lyric force reflecting profound hermetic life." -- Carol Muske-Dukes, author of Twin Cities

Anna Journey's The Judas Ear resurrects a host of vanished people and places, often through marvelous Ovidian metamorphoses that seem as natural in the gritty tableaux of Richmond, Virginia, as in the luminous transmuting vistas of folktale or myth. Journey's music is lush and visceral, her humor warm and sly, and her sensibility metes out tenderness and grotesquerie in equal parts. Like the ear-shaped mushroom named for a biblical betrayer, the poems in The Judas Ear can shift suddenly from wit to pathos, from seductiveness to danger, with a generosity of vision that is at once wise and revelatory.