Torch the Empty Fields: (171 New Women's Voices)

Torch the Empty Fields reveals the voices of mothers, daughters, friends, partners, and even the earth Herself. Examining personal and social loss and celebrating survival, these are wry and graceful poems of witness and new beginnings, a reflective collection inspired by Virgil's poem of nature and the land, The Georgics. When you torch the fields, the new growth is lush; the narrative poems in this deft work explore our burning struggles and the wonders of life.

About the Author :
Mary Jo LoBello Jerome, poet, editor, freelance writer, and teacher, is a Pennsylvania Poet Laureate from Bucks County. She edited Fire Up the Poems, an anthology of creative writing prompts for teachers (2021) and is currently a poetry co-editor of Schuylkill Valley Journal. Mary Jo's writing has been published widely. She has lived and taught in her native New Jersey, Rotterdam, and Tokyo and has settled in southeastern PA with her husband.

Review :
While lamenting all we've recently lost, the poems collected in Mary Jo LoBello Jerome's Torch the Empty Fields are themselves fertile with language's powers: to proclaim, confess, luxuriate, and linger over what we might miss if we're not paying close enough attention. Phenomena such as "the pulsing tiny body of a ruby/-throated hummingbird, small enough to nest/ in a lichen-lined tablespoon" hop into these poems playfully, colorfully, as if to say look at me, remember my fleeting form. A witness as well as a listener, at turns both irreverent and sweet, Mary LoBello Jerome is truly a poet to watch. -Ethel Rackin, author of Evening and Crafting Poems and Stories: A Guide to Creative Writing What good company these poems are. Mary Jo LoBello Jerome shares with us lovely and cherished things: a keepsake stone, a glorious field of tulips, a curl of lemon in a cocktail. When she engages troubling things, she does so with slantwise grace. Above all, she celebrates devotedness and companionship, what it means for people to be near and faithful to each other. We listen to a mother's final instructions to her daughter. We see a couple setting up their first apartment, older women gathering for a game of cards, a wife in bed with her husband contemplating both spiritual and earthly things. These poems are good friends. Stay with them and visit them often. -Lynn Levin, author of The Minor Virtues "The world begins with you," Mary Jo LoBello Jerome says in Torch the Empty Fields, which borrows from Virgil's Georgics, a poetic guidebook to bucolic life. The poet deftly braids stories of women like daffodil leaves-from the world-wise speaker, who "search[es] for the mystical everywhere," to friends, mothers, daughters, even the earth Herself. Jerome's voice, by turns wry, humble, and reverent, always carries the insight of experience and the subtle flourish of a consummate hand, one able (and one we trust) to deftly lead us from a "grey Dutch sky" to a field of flowers "dazzling and giddy with color," mere lines later. She asks us "what remains? / What will be remembered?" And we realize the answer-that these poems, seeds sown with skill and care, will bear us succulent fruit for generations. -Chad Frame, author of Little Black Book