Judas Ear

<p>Anna Journey's <i>The Judas Ear </i>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 shape-shifting 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 <i>The Judas Ear</i> can shift suddenly from wit to pathos from seductiveness to danger with a generosity of vision that is at once wise and revelatory.</p>