Waypoints

These lyrical poems mark waypoints on a life-long journey. The poet struggles to find reason in a chaotic world where senseless cruelty is sometimes met with selfless kindness. She sees miracles in flocks of migrating cranes, reads life's secrets in a child's eyes. In love with the beauty and power of language, she uses it to reflect what she sees, to give stifled feelings a voice, to illustrate meaning with metaphor. In love with the world's physical beauty, she finds joy in wild places, solace in recurring seasons. In love with the diverse community around her, she embraces other peoples' stories and shares her own. Born in one country, raised in another, yet belonging in neither, the young poet searches for her identity; the aging poet strives to make peace with her past and welcome her future. "Waypoints" celebrates the ties that bind the human family together across generations, across barriers of culture and language, across national boundaries.

About the Author :
As a child growing up in Mexico City, Johanna shuttled between two languages, two cultures. Retired from a forty year career as a studio potter, she put her language skills to work as a volunteer ESL teacher and aide to immigrant families. Waypoints, a collection of poems written over the past ten years, tells some of their stories as well as her own. Because her life has straddled the border, her work does too.

Review :
The narrative poems of Johanna DeMay's Waypoints carry the darkness of Steinbeck or Flannery O'Connor, though these poems find their night in Mexico and New Mexico. Here is the scrawny pregnant woman the narrator runs away from instead of giving change to, and how the thought of her "aches like a broken bone." There is David, the mute brother abandoned in a state asylum, so the narrator claims she is an only child and when she has a son "did not/name him David." Witness the mother weeping in anguish who follows the speaker, whispering in the long hallways of her bones, then falling silent, "a piano without strings." See the father fleeing the pogroms in Russia, and the daughter "invisible in my whiteness, / no yellow star stitched to my dress," yet eyed askance by the neighbor whose "word for 'human'/wascristiano." Hear the wailing of La Llorona and the testimony of the abused. And yet in the murky human night of these poems there are strange lightning strikes of joy: the wild anthem of the coyotes, jazzy riffs, soaring high notes that make her "taut nerves hum/like a plucked harp"; and the unlikely stories of God and providence, made up to comfort us like the kindness of "candles in the dark." These remarkable poems are stark and thrilling, full of grace and doubt, and all the mire of our human complexity. I love them. -Dr. Tony Barnstone, Professor of English and Environmental Studies, Whittier College Johanna DeMay's conviction and compassion, her ability to capture both our interactions with each other and with the world around us in direct, moving and eloquent language, never fails to illuminate this remarkable first collection. -Diana Anhalt, author of Walking Backward, (Georgia Co-Author of the Year 2019); Lives of Straw; Second Skin; because there is no return Johanna DeMay's poetry digs into pain, survival, loss. In Mi Ultimo Amor "Be fearless/Be a woman" hits a nerve. In "Unresolved" there's reference to "the six-pointed star I wore" in comparison to her "gold cross wearing neighbor" whose "word for 'human' was Cristiano." We hear voices of refugees captured and a recurrent theme, "the question of my identity/remains unsolved." Her poetry is compelling, avoiding nothing. -Nina Rubinstein Alonso, editor Constellations Johanna DeMay's book Waypoints plots out a life of creation and loss in clear poems that compel reading. Memory morphs into metaphor, sound is primary, progenitors are leaders, and identity is hybrid. Between Mexico and America, "A two thousand mile-long/jagged wound, numbed with narcotics, sutured/with steel mesh and barbed wire, the border festers." I find most moving here the poet's series in the voices of transgendered youth trying to emigrate. DeMay is a fine poet who has written a deeply moving book on predations through centuries: human on human, Covid 19 on life, adults on children, human on nature. And the loses of age. Still these poems sing. -Hilda Raz, author of Letter from a Place I've Never Been: New and Collected Poems, 1986-2020