Lois Roma-Deeley

High Notes
With its many thematic riffs and harmonic phrasings, Lois Roma-Deeley's newest collection of poems invites the reader into the shadowy jazz scene of the late 1950s, where music and language fuse into a road of longing and desire. This book won the Benu Press Samuel T. Coleridge Prize.

Benu Press awards The Samuel T. Coleridge Prize for "an outstanding work of literature, written by a contemporary author, that fulfills Coleridge's vision of the artist as a reconciling architect of the imagination. Such a work reconfigures our understanding of the world to establish new meaning in a future transformed by hope."

Advance praise for Lois Roma-Deeley’s High Notes

“The poetry is terse and direct, packed with significance. She creates language to capture a beautiful experience, the music of the lines alternate between dark and bright, sad and happy, mean and sweet. This is pain poetry, pain endured, celebrated, loved and danced to. This poetry tastes blood but not the blood of hospitals or healing, but of open wounds getting wider, deeper, unforgiving. It's taut, tough, in your face and orchestrates like a mad symphony of howls and laughters and blues, blues, blues baby, that burn to read. It's a clean, crisp, starlight fire, that'll lead you back to your life purpose and make you rethink and reshape your view of life.”
--Jimmy Santagio Baca

“In the emotionally rich and technically varied rhythms of High Notes, the voices of four men and women, black and white, negotiate between the excitements of jazz and the constrictions of poverty and drugs, accompanied and overseen by an angel’s presence. Jazz “greats” make cameo appearances in this lyrical, fragmented narrative, but the spotlight is on the invented characters. From sonnets and other fixed forms to jazz-inspired improvisations and prose poems, the book’s shifting styles reflect the characters’ complex lives. Incomplete, unresolved, hovering between tragedy and redemption, their story stays with us.”
--Martha Collins

“Containing riffs and improvisations in various keys and tempos, Lois Roma-Deeley's High Notes captures the starkness and despair of the late 50s jazz scene, where every blues number is fueled by alcohol, heroin, and guilt. High Notes unrolls like a period film in blacks, whites, and all the shades of gray, telling the intertwined stories of four characters who can endure anything except the absence of hope.”
--R.S.Gwynn

northSight
Lois Roma-Deeley’s second collection of poems, northSight (Singularity Press, 2006), earned a nod from the Los Angeles Book Prize nominating committee and received critical praise. Critics have written that Lois Roma-Deeley's powerful poems are as "tough and brave" as they are "brilliant," "beautiful" and, finally, "soul-satisfying." The mystic journey into the dangerous world of Lois Roma-Deeley's northSight takes us through the caverns of "the hunted and the hunting heart."

Our traveling companions on this road make a "vital chorus" of those who suffer—or those who make others suffer. Those who survive with dignity and those who—with great astonishment—disappear into their own despair. On this journey we meet both Beast and Angel: rapists, waitresses, prostitutes, war heroes, tattoo girls, Italian immigrants, dope dealers, day laborers, monks, bikers, and firemen as well as the uncommitted, the confused and the slightly insane.

As if the earth underneath our feet will split open at any given moment, these poems fight to keep their fierce balance between the world as we know it and the world as it should be.

This is a book that dares us to hope.

Rules of Hunger
Critical Praise for Rules of Hunger

When in 1990 he had seen the first issue of Bill Baer’s The Formalist, A Journal of Metrical Poetry (alas! no longer extant) Arthur Miller wrote, "I am sure I will not be the only one who will be grateful for it. Frankly, it was a shock to realize, as I looked through the first issue, that I had very nearly given up the idea of taking pleasure from poetry." That is the trouble with American poets nowadays, they have forgotten how to entertain the reader. The result is that almost none of the general public reads poetry anymore — it is no longer a pleasurable experience. That's why running across someone like Lois Roma-Deeley is so satisfying. Her first book of poetry, titled Rules of Hunger, is not only readable, it is enjoyable to read. She is a poet who often writes out of her Italian-American background, but not only that. She can conjure up that world in words. You don't believe me? Look at this from "The Apostle of Wax and Shine":

If St. Paul should ever lose his way

on this road that leads through 1959,

to my seven-year-old self sitting on the front steps

staring into the nothingness that would become my future,

he would find a rag top convertible, and my father

the Apostle of Wax and Shine.

Perfect!

--Lewis Turco