Winner, 2024 Blue Light Poetry Prize

Joyce Meyers taught English at the high school and college levels, then embarked on a new career as an attorney, practicing law in Philadelphia for almost three decades.Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Atlanta Review, The Comstock Review, Iodine Poetry Journal, Slant, Evening Street Review, Xanadu, Glimpse, and Muse Literary Journal. She won First Prize in the Atlanta Review 2014 International Poetry Competition, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her published collections include Twisted Threads (Kelsay Books, 2024), selected as a Distinguished Favorite by The Independent Press Award; The Way Back (Kelsay Books, 2017); and two chapbooks, Shapes of Love (Finishing Line Press, 2010), and Wild Mushrooms (Plan B Press, 2007).

The poems in Stray Moments are incredibly deep in their understanding of the world and our place in it. These poems do not stray; they move like light through changes in the seasons and the loves and losses of all living things. In language and insight so precise that we grow dizzy on the "cusp of ripeness and decay," Meyers shows how, as the December sun "hangs low as if still leashed to night," so do we hold on; how robins in February can make a heart "soar;" how it is possible to "hear the light singing/before the sun's rim/edges over the ridge;" and that always, "Somewhere between/here and the horizon sharks circle." These wonderful poems lead us to see how we might apprehend our own worlds, seen and unseen, and feel our "heart a caged bird/set free."

Patricia Lee Lewis, award-winning poet, author of A Kind of Yellow

and High Lonesome.